is siebel right?
Source: Read Full Article in NY Times
This is a somewhat provocative article in the NY Times about the end of the glory days of enterprise IT. Not so provocative among IT circles, but certainly within the mainstream media.
There is some truth to what he is saying in the sense that most of the core high-value business problems have already been solved to death: accounting, HR, manufacturing, logistics, customer management, etc. They were repeatedly solved in successive waves on the mainframe, client-server, browser, and now SaaS. I think Siebel is right in saying that the time has passed when money can be made by just showing up, connecting a known business problem to a target architecture and implementing the obvious use-cases. As my colleague Bob is fond of saying, we’ve hunted all the buffalo, as it were. Jumping into the buffalo hunting business now is not going to be wildly profitable.
The one business problem that hasn’t been solved very well is: security.
My opinion right now is that most of the innovation is happening at the bottom of the stack, particularly with virtualization and cloud-based architectures. Until now this has largely been about cost and efficiency within the IT organization, not identifying and solving new business problems.
I suspect this will start to change as technologies like column-oriented databases start to get some uptake within enterprise IT. Vast volumes of data have been collecting for years in relational databases, most of which can’t really be utilized in any practical way. SOA has helped somewhat, but for the most part, this is like connecting some lakes together with soda straws and calling it a canal system.
So what new, as-yet-unidentified business problems can be solved with cheap, massively parallel, on-demand cloud-based processing?
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