Since the dawn of commercial computing, it’s been self-evident that large enterprises had the best IT systems. They had the biggest budgets, the economies of scale, and the most interesting challenges. Even the time-sharing companies that dominated much of computing in the 1960s and 70s were usually outgrowths of large IT departments, still owned by their original parent companies.
At first blush, the large enterprises’ superiority still seems secure. The most interesting uses of enterprise computing right now are probably high-end analytics, and that’s the province of the big guys, with their humongous databases. (If your data warehouse runs well on Oracle or SQL Server, it’s not big enough to be impressive. Real geeks use Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, or their competitors.) The really smart uses of data mining, text mining, and optimization usually are found at household-name companies (or deep dark government intelligence agencies, but let’s not talk about them). And the most serious OLTP application suites are the province of the biggest companies too.
But upon further review, the dominance of the big guys is showing an awful lot of cracks.
- Client/server computing got its first major foothold in small trading departments of decent-sized Wall Street firms, back in the early 1990s. A decade later, the same was true of complex event/stream processing, aka CEP, a seriously cool technology that is apt to have broad impact in the future.
- Data warehouse appliance innovator Netezza got its start selling to third-party information analyzers. DATAllegro’s largest customer is a data mart outsourcer as too. Now Vertica, ParAccel, and Infobright – three of the best options for data warehousing software if you absolutely, positively do not want to use an appliance – all report significant fractions of their business from data mart outsourcers or similar third parties as well.
- The text mining center of gravity seems to be shifting to analytic outsourcers too.
- The Windows monopoly is famously losing share, to Firefox and Macs alike. That’s not being led by large enterprises.
And even more to the point, some of the most innovative and largest-scale computing challenges in the world are those at Google, eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon.
Trends in the application software and business intelligence (BI) businesses are also undercutting the big shops’ dominance. Outsourcing – whether via SaaS (Software as a Service) or in other forms — is the most obvious reason. But equally important is the compelling pressure on enterprise software vendors to make their software easier to install and use. A great deal of buying is driven by business departments rather than IT organizations these days. Some IT vendors are responding with all sorts of packaging improvements – SaaS and appliances being just two – to make their products possible to adopt without heavy reliance on IT. Most other vendors have to respond if they want to keep up.
What’s more, large-enterprise IT is hugely concerned with legacy systems. Few organizations in their right minds would adopt Windows or Oracle today if they could start from scratch, let alone the older cruft that many big firms are stuck with. (Macs over Windows for quality, and Postgres Plus over Oracle for price.) And at the really big companies, more legacy cruft comes in every year via mergers and acquisitions.
Many people question whether IT is even a good career choice nowadays, given the prevalence of outsourcing. I think it is. But increasingly, large brick-and-mortar firms aren’t the place to look for IT leadership, challenges, or opportunity.
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