Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.
Eric Hoffer
Dear Vorticians,
Last week I promised to tell you about two companies setting out to revolutionize the world of enterprise IT. I began by laying out the USP – that’s unique selling proposition to you acronym haters and non-sales types – of newcomer Azul Systems. I’ll complete my commitment this week by introducing (or reacquainting) you with the new offspring of Bill Coleman, who’s already proven his mettle as tech visionary by founding BEA Systems.
Coleman’s heavily funded Cassatt Corp. is aiming to help companies make better use of their existing Windows/Linux computing and storage infrastructure by providing a layer of software – called Collage – that knits everything together into an on-demand environment. Coleman claims Collage delivers on the on-demand promise simply and with no retrofitting required for existing systems.
Sounds deceptively simple, and you’d be appropriately skeptical to wonder whether anyone can pull off something this grandiose. Time – and customer experiences – will tell.
But Coleman doesn’t just see this as a nice business opportunity. Rather, he believes that this is the next great business opportunity in enterprise IT and that his approach is bad news for the existing leaders in the industry.
The following is from some company information Coleman shared with me: “Cassatt is addressing a new software infrastructure platform opportunity; the automation of IT operations. In fact, it is probably the last one that we will see in infrastructure software for at least the next decade. As such, the incumbent gorillas (The “big guys”) don’t even have a chance…
If done correctly, this may be the biggest software opportunity of all. It compromises the economics of all the hardware players and the back office outsourcing companies. At the same time it dramatically drives down costs of both OpEX and CapEX for customers, gives them much better QoS and enables priority based business agility.”
In Coleman’s view, Collage helps speed the commoditization of the underlying hardware platforms- disrupting the current industry structure – and accelerates the adoption of service-oriented applications. Cassatt actually describes the effect its products will have as a “perfect storm” for the IT industry – devaluation of hardware and the “dis-integration” of monolithic applications. As Coleman told me, “The effect on IT is total commoditization which will result in the almost total destruction of the economics of the current players.”
Perhaps more important, operations automation enables customers to focus on innovative new uses of their information, rather than the mechanics of IT – kind of the Holy Grail of enterprise computing. They can spend more time deriving value and new business opportunity from data, rather than trying to make complex apps run.
Cassatt is currently shipping an early version of Collage and you can find out more about the company at http://www.cassatt.com.
Before I leave you for this week, I need to apologize for not running any of your letters recently. I promise to get to them soon. Also, a news note: Cisco, the leader in wireless LANs, this week agreed to spend nearly half a billion bucks buying – guess what – a wireless LAN company, Airespace. The two companies have taken markedly different approaches to architecting WLANs and it will be interesting to see how they come together, or don’t.
So, bye for now. As always, share your thoughts with me at mailto:jgallant@vortex.net.
