Virtual fountains of Youth

Cloud is here to stay, and companies big and small are struggling to adapt. There is no shortage of articles with advice on what to change.

Organizations are living organisms. They are born, they grow and develop, they evolve to a certain size and at some point they dissolve (die) like all other organisms. The question is whether this is just me making fatalistic observations, or if there are fundamental laws at work which truly make these cycles inevitable.

The article referenced above suggests that telecom service providers should own their own destiny, by hiring people with knowledge typically found at vendors today. The thing is that telecom service providers are already full of smart people. The approach of outsourcing certain tasks and responsibilities to external parties is fundamental to achieving scale and sufficient focus on core activities, enabling telecom organizations to specialize and differentiate. To "beat" OTT players like Google and Amazon, trying to become like them isn't the answer. Those new hires would find existing organizational structures with barriers and limitations, most likely the very reasons why some of them left these old shells for newer, greener pastures in the first place.

I see a clash of generations, mature organizations versus relatively new players. Even though the average age of the people working at these organizations may not differ much, their management, structure and agility does. The younger organizations are somehow better adapted to embrace modern technologies known as "Cloud" or "SDN" or "NFV" today.

Is this merely survival of the fittest? Or can we find ways to fundamentally change our existing organizations - if so, what does this proverbial Fountain of Youth look like?

The Software Defined Enterprise

Increased online activity around  topics like Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) shows revived market interest in the networking aspect of the { compute, storage, networking } triade that forms the foundation of distributed systems in general, and the Internet in particular.

To a large extend, these concepts are nothing more than rephrased expressions of existing ideas. Virtualization and abstraction are not new, and anyone claiming that they are has simply not been around long enough. Still, things are not the same today as they were before. So what is different, and why, and how should we adapt to cope with this new reality?

Clay Shirky sheds some light on this in his book "Here Comes Everybody". Technological advances like broadband Internet have radically changed the world we live in, and this both enables and requires new ways of organizing our activities. It does not matter how we call it - enterprises need to adapt their processes and the behaviour and mindset of their employees in order to survive, evolve and procreate. Herein lies the true value of things currently being discussed under the name of "SDN" and "NFV".

Over the next few months I'll be exploring this topic in more depth. For now, let's start with a name: I am calling it the "Software Defined Enterprise"