I recently went on a trip to Venice - recommended for all! - and wanted to read up a bit on the history of Venice before I went. "City of Fortune. How Venice won and lost a naval empire" by Roger Crowley turned out to be a very good read for the golden years of Venice, let's say from year 1000, when newly elected Doge Orseolo II turned the sea and ports of the Adriatic into their own shipping lanes and safe havens for trade until around year 1500, when the Ottomans all but controlled the East of the Mediterranean and the main trading routes East-West on land and on sea.
And, just as importantly, the Portuguese with Vasco da Gama in 1499 finally found a direct route to Calcutta and India, meaning that many many middlemen and tax increases along the historical Silk Route or through the many ports of Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople and others in the Mediterranean, could be bypassed, and other nations and kings could take over the lucrative trade in spices, glas and minerals that the venetians had controlled for hundreds of years with great margins and profit. News of the direct route to India reached Venice in 1500, and most traders and sailors understood the implications right away. Venice was based on controlling the trades from the East through many middlemen, bribes, taxes and being the best, or most greedy, traders over years and years - this business model was now going away rapidly.
What's this to do with cloud IT?
Not trying to stretch the point to far here, but one can make the point that just as the venetians were very good at managing and controlling their ships, their sourcing for trade of all kind, middlemen and taxes along the way to get goods and material into Venice, and then moved on to the rest of Italy or northern-Europe, corporate IT has become fairly good at managing and controlling their
And this has been how corporate IT has functioned and worked for a number of years, to the benefit of the IT department, their suppliers and mostly to their customers.
And, just as importantly, the Portuguese with Vasco da Gama in 1499 finally found a direct route to Calcutta and India, meaning that many many middlemen and tax increases along the historical Silk Route or through the many ports of Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople and others in the Mediterranean, could be bypassed, and other nations and kings could take over the lucrative trade in spices, glas and minerals that the venetians had controlled for hundreds of years with great margins and profit. News of the direct route to India reached Venice in 1500, and most traders and sailors understood the implications right away. Venice was based on controlling the trades from the East through many middlemen, bribes, taxes and being the best, or most greedy, traders over years and years - this business model was now going away rapidly.
What's this to do with cloud IT?
Not trying to stretch the point to far here, but one can make the point that just as the venetians were very good at managing and controlling their ships, their sourcing for trade of all kind, middlemen and taxes along the way to get goods and material into Venice, and then moved on to the rest of Italy or northern-Europe, corporate IT has become fairly good at managing and controlling their
- servers, storage and network infrastructure
- sourcing of licenses and IT services
- re-sellers, channel partners and suppliers for hardware or software
- enterprise budgets, cost centers and TCO activities
- distribution of IT-resources, applications, services and access to their users/customers
And this has been how corporate IT has functioned and worked for a number of years, to the benefit of the IT department, their suppliers and mostly to their customers.
But customers always want more, or the ones being on the road and being mobile certainly are, as are developers who hate dealing with the IT department and corporate IT frameworks. And, it turns out, so does the CFO (or he wants less...) and increasingly the CIO. Once these guys get the "no way" or the "we don't support that" once too many, they will start scouting for alternatives that meets their business needs better than corporate IT can. And many of these has found the direct path without too many middlemen to cloud based services for their processing or storage need, for the development and test environment they seek or for more flexible big data analytics logging and visualization services than they get from their "always 2 releases behind" internal IT business intelligence solution.
They find the direct path to Calcutta.
Now, the story isn't that corporate IT will be left in the backwaters like Venice was some years ago, but that corporate IT needs to understand and adopt to that users will always look for better, cheaper and more flexible ways to get their work done. And that corporate IT needs to develop their own cloud IT services story, get to Calcutta before their users and put up safe working conditions for their users no matter where they might be or end up.
Erik Jensen, 06.11.2013
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