From lumber to Legos

An adaptive/on-demand infrastructure – optimized for change and dynamically aligned with business behaviors – will depend on next-generation management software integrated with network, system and application components with a deliberateness, consistency and care that generally don’t exist today.

For vendors to deliver products that reflect such a worldview, new business models will have to evolve not only across the management software markets, but also across just about all of high tech.

The reasons for this are not simple, but might be summarized by two analogies. It used to be that management frameworks were likened to “building blocks” – and to some degree we still hear this. Five years ago, those “building blocks” were more like lumber, nails and paint. In other words, IT was asked to invest in management structures that took many months and sometimes years to build – and then, when things changed, adapted more with chainsaws and sweat than with dynamic grace.

New management frameworks are more like Legos, designed with flexible, reusable components. Adaptive or on-demand infrastructures will integrate network and systems hardware components with software and application components into the same dynamic matrix, as “self-healing” and “self optimization” become more real and normative. Take the analogy a little further – to what’s really required – and you might look beyond Legos to cellular, living forms that actively respond and adapt, grow and shrink, in response to a complex array of changing stimuli. Management software will have to exceed Legos in dynamic flexibility, but will probably fall somewhat short of new, living forms.

Now if you believe that single-brand approaches to management, or massive, unilateral alliances between all-powerful hardware and software vendors are the wave of the future, you might be right, but that would be a sad outcome. High tech has grown from choice, and that means multi-brand options at all levels. Doing this effectively will mean new kinds of business relationships among vendors, with new business models – in which citizenship and integration are as important as raw functionality. As a result of this, differentiation across brands will have to take on richer, less self-aggrandizing dimensions.

Are architecture and business models where the ultimate action is? I personally do not believe there is any other way to get to an adaptive/on-demand world, I welcome intelligent rebuttals if you think you know of some other, viable path. Within whatever latitude my editors grant me, I will be happy to print any rebuttals – at least in part.

If I’m right, by the way, you IT and service provider buyers will need to think about product acquisition differently. Your choice in management products will continue to be multi-brand, but what you will want for your strategic core is a modularized source of automation and services with management application choice. And when you plan an infrastructure upgrade, your selection of hardware and application components will evolve into criteria beyond traditional performance metrics, into those related to what I call “citizenship” across a complex set of automated interdependencies. Just what the parameters of “citizenship” will be across network, system and application components, however, still remains largely written in water. We are looking realistically at a trend which is beginning now, and which may take more than a decade to truly mature.

But that’s no reason not to pay attention now. There are many years of competitive advantage for you in leading, rather than following – this evolution. And to a large degree, it can never happen without you and your changing, more demanding, expectations.