Cameron HaightI recently downloaded the movie “Father of Invention” where actor Kevin Spacey describes himself as a “fabricator” that combines old inventions into new ones that he then sells on infomercials. The movie was okay, but as I was watching and eating my popcorn, I kept coming back to the fabricator term. I t
hink this is a good way to describe what a lot of the “Big Four” management vendors do. And this is both good news and bad news. These large firms mostly acquire existing technologies, often add some IP of their own and then introduce something with added value (such as BSM, etc.). It’s been a good business model which manages risk for the large companies and offers a liquidity event to an “innovator” firm whose investors may be concerned about the cost of building out a sales channel. In economic terms, this would be viewed as an efficient use of capital as the larger management firms usually have the capabilities to more effectively take the acquired technology to a broader level of adoption. However, there may be an industry downside to this and it relates to innovation.
The traditional management vendors have R&D groups to be sure, but it tends to be little “r” or research and mostly big “d” or development (some would say integration). True, companies like HP have a substantial research effort, but historically only some of this seems applicable to the IT management space although this may be changing. Net is that when acquisitions occur among these larger players, we often seem to see some degree of stagnation of the purchased technology. While this too may be starting to change, I still expect that we will see more of this cycle play out in the years to come as new markets emerge. Thus we may need to start looking elsewhere for “sustainable” innovation in the IT management marketplace.
One area that I have been following more closely is the work being done by the large cloud services providers as part of my DevOps coverage. Google and Yahoo are engaging in widespread cloud research and even organizations such as Netflix and Flickr are providing information on some of their engineering and operations-oriented work. Why is this important to the management space? Because they often eat their own dog food, i.e., what they build for their applications needs often winds up playing a role in their management infrastructure. Unlike some start-ups that may be still trying to determine market requirements, these organizations are building technology that they need today and thus has immediate application. Hence we are starting to see more scalable management technology (search for the presentation “Distributed Computing at Google plus see here) and new operations approaches starting to come to the forefront.
While many of these tools and processes may not find direct application within the enterprise, I believe that some of this progress will find its way into the more traditional corporate world. In fact, I assert that future management platforms will likely incorporate more of a Web 2.0-style architecture paradigm if for no other reason to deal with a future involving “big management data". In a way, these large cloud services providers are becoming new-age NASAs helping to develop technology for a specific need that will likely see some degree of more broad-based commercialization down the road. They may very well become the IT management innovators of the future.
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