In 2003, Writer Nick Carr shook up enterprise C-suites around the world with
his seminal article for Harvard Business Review he provocatively titled IT
Doesn't Matter.
Fresh off the dot-com crash but before cloud computing took off, Carr
observed that the belief that IT's strategic value increases in parallel with
its potency and ubiquity was seriously mistaken.
His central thesis: "What makes a resource truly strategic - what gives it
the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage - is not
ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing
something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT - data
storage, data processing, and data transport - have become available and
affordable to all."
Carr then explained how proprietary technologies can provide strategic
advantage, but over time, technology become... (more)
Preparing for the Next Disruption
By Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I'll never forget the day that I first encountered the Internet. It was 1989
when a friend who worked in aerospace showed it to me - and I immediately
ignored it.
I wasn't alone. Almost everyone missed the true impact it would have on the
world. I originally told this story in my first book, The Quantum Age of IT:
Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change and went on to explain
how this encounter had precipitated the three market forces that had changed
everything.
These three market forces were:
The consumerization of IT - how consumer technologies changed the
expectations and perceptions of technology consumers The criticality of IT -
how technology moved from a back-office focus to powering every business
process, every customer interaction and virtually every element of the ... (more)
In the No-Code corner are the ‘citizen developers' - business users who can
build functional but generally limited apps without having to write a line of
code. The Low-Code corner, in contrast, centers on professional developers,
streamlining and simplifying their work - delivering enterprise-class
applications with little or no hand-coding.
At Intellyx we gravitate toward disruption, and the burgeoning
Low-Code/No-Code space has sucked us in like a black hole.
We've spoken with numerous vendors in this multifaceted market, and we work
with several of them - and yet, every one has a different value proposition.
The big analyst firms can't make heads or tails of this mess. Gartner has
concocted the High-Productivity Application Platform-as-a-Service mouthful,
or what hapless vendors call HPaPaaS - as though anyone would want to buy the
low-productivity alternative.
F... (more)
The visual model to declarative metadata representation to immutable
deployment vision is in essence what SD is all about.
The secret to making this approach practical, and thus the key to
understanding why SD approaches have become so prevalent, is the word
immutable.
Once we get an SD approach right, we no longer have to touch the deployed
technology whatsoever. Instead, to make a change, update the model and
redeploy.
In a recent Cortex, I bemoaned the fact that as buzzwords go, Digital
Transformation is excessively vague. There is yet another buzzword of our
times that is suffering the same fate: Software-Defined.
Rare though buzz-adjectives may be among the pantheon of buzz-nouns and the
occasional buzz-verb, Software-Defined (SD) has become remarkably pervasive.
In fact, it ties together many different, quite disparate concepts into what
has become a vague mi... (more)
Digital transformation. Digital strategy. Digital leadership. Digital
enterprise. Digital customer journey.
It seems the list of things that have gone digital is unending and remarkably
broad.
Underlying all of these intertwined digital concepts? Unquestionably, some
kind of technology.
Digital technology.
Just one problem: nobody agrees on just what constitutes digital technology.
And without a grasp on what technologies are digital - or more to the point,
what technologies are not digital - we've built our entire digital edifice on
a foundation of sand.
Ones and Zeroes
We can all agree that the broadest definition of digital technology would be
technology that uses ones and zeroes to represent data. After all, bits - aka
binary digits - are where we got the word digital in the first place.
Using this definition, digital technology launched on Valentine's Day in ... (more)
A completely new computing platform is on the horizon. They're called
Microservers by some, ARM Servers by others, and sometimes even ARM-based
Servers. No matter what you call them, Microservers will have a huge impact
on the data center and on server computing in general.
What Is a Microserver...and What Isn't
Although few people are familiar with Microservers today, their impact will
be felt very soon. This is a new category of computing platform that is
available today and is predicted to have triple-digit growth rates for some
years to come - growing to over 20% of the server market by 2016 according to
Oppenheimer ("Cloudy With A Chance of ARM" Oppenheimer Equity Research
Industry Report).
According to Chris Piedmonte, CEO of Suvola Corporation - a software and
services company focused on creating preconfigured and scalable Microserver
appliances for deployin... (more)
The Deconstruction of Digital Transformation
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
The complex idea behind the term digital transformation is that technology
has created a fundamental shift in how organizations operate. The
consumerization of technology - and the customer empowerment it created - has
upended the traditional operating paradigm of organizations moving it away
from a capital and process-centric model to a customer-centric one.
The need to digitally transform your organization is now - or at least should
be - a strategic imperative. The fact, however, that the term digital
transformation is now a bona fide buzzword has obfuscated its importance.
The problem is that we create buzzwords because we need a simple, shorthand
way of communicating what is otherwise a complex idea. In the process,
however, the deeper, underlying complexity of the... (more)
Digital Transformation: Not Because It's Easy, But Because It's Hard
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
Pop quiz: What's the first thing you should do after you've completed your
digital transformation?
If you've followed our work here at Intellyx, you know this was a trick
question.
Digital transformation is a process, not a destination. It's a fundamental
reshaping of an organization's culture that reorients it around the customer
experience, business value and constant change.
It's not about executing a ‘digital transformation project' and finding a
new normal. The essence of digital transformation is the destruction of the
static state.
This essence is a challenging concept to grasp, ironically, because while we
talk about digital transformation, we do it through an industrial era filter.
It's difficult to imagine a change of state this fund... (more)
We've seen many buzzwordy innovations in technology over the last decade,
from cloud computing to big data to microservices and beyond - but artificial
intelligence (AI) by far has the most buzzword baggage.
On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations
since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it
continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves.
We didn't suffer this kind of PR nightmare with the cloud, or the web, or
even client/server. In fact, AI has an unprecedented set of PR challenges
that threaten to sink the entire movement.
AI vendors, from the burgeoning gaggle of AI startups all the way to IBM, are
all crowded together at the eye of this hurricane. However, this PR storm
impacts enterprises as well, as AI promises to change the role technology
plays for every industry on this planet... (more)
To paraphrase an old joke, there are four stages of digital transformation:
What is digital transformation? We need digital transformation! We need
whatever comes next after digital transformation! What is digital
transformation?
By 2016, most enterprises had successfully navigated their way from #1 to #2,
but now that it's 2017, there's a good chance #3 is in the offing.
After all, digital transformation has been the hot topic for a while now.
Will 2017 be the year it becomes passé? And if so, what should we do next?
Buzzword Fatigue: It's Inevitable
In times of disruption, buzzwords play an important role. As new
technologies, approaches, and priorities spring up, we need a common
vocabulary so that we can cogently discuss such innovations.
However, it's easy to overuse or misapply buzzwords. Just like salt in your
soup: a pinch may be pleasing, but put in too much a... (more)
DALLAS, Aug. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Amid the proliferation of real
time data from sources such as mobile devices, web, social media, sensors,
log files and transactional applications, Big Data has found a host of
vertical market applications, ranging from fraud detection to R&D.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140821/138541
"Big Data Market: 2014 – 2020 – Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies,
Industry Verticals & Forecasts"
Key Findings:
In 2014 Big Data vendors will pocket nearly $30 Billion from hardware,
software and professional services revenues Big Data investments are further
expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 17% over the next 6 years, eventually
accounting for $76 Billion by the end of 2020 The market is ripe for
acquisitions of pure-play Big Data startups, as competition heats up between
IT incumbents Nearly every large scale IT ven... (more)
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