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Tag: enterprise technology

  • Collaboration Between Competitors is the Future of Enterprise Technology

    Collaboration Between Competitors is the Future of Enterprise Technology

    Mark my words: 2019 will be the year enterprise technology companies go back to kindergarten and realize that sharing really is caring—about their customers. Several key moves last year point toward a future full of collaboration between large and small technology vendors—even those that compete against one another.

    Companies rarely use a single vendor for all their enterprise IT needs, and their shift toward increased agility and their need for specialized capabilities will only lead to greater fragmentation. The vendors that make it easiest for their customers to connect IT systems with one another will be the biggest winners in the current IT market, even if that means they must work with previously sworn enemies.

    While integrating products with those of a competitor may seem like a risky move, the vendors that pull off those integrations have the ability to actually strengthen their defensibility through the application of network effects. Think of it this way: An ERP system becomes more valuable to the company that uses it with each successful connection the system makes to the company’s other systems of record. In turn, that makes it more difficult for the company to turn around and replace those systems.

    Key Examples

    Over the past five years, competing enterprise technology companies increasingly have partnered with one another to benefit their shared customers. Last year was a significant year for that sort of collaboration in the enterprise space.

    Salesforce.com announced several key strategic partnerships last year, including work with AWS that will make it easier for customers to send data back and forth from Amazon’s cloud. Of particular interest is the work the two companies are doing on Amazon Connect, the Seattle-based company’s contact center software that competes with Salesforce’s own Lightning Dialer product. Google Cloud and Salesforce are also working together on IoT and analytics applications to serve their shared customers, even though Salesforce already offers its own analytics suite.

    On the end user side, Google now allows Box users to store files from Google’s G Suite collaboration service in the content services company’s cloud, and is working with Dropbox to provide similar functionality. Box and Dropbox compete with Google Drive, but working with the other companies allows Google to broaden its appeal, especially to companies that would prefer their data not get stored on Google’s servers.

    But there’s a new sort of collaboration on the horizon: Multi-company alliances that provide even broader benefits to customers. Microsoft, SAP and Adobe announced last fall that they’re working on a new project called the Open Data Initiative that’s supposed to bring customer data from the three companies’ disparate products together into a common data lake for processing and analysis. Under the new initiative, customers should be able to read and write data from all three companies’ business applications.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the time that customer demand for collaboration and integration was the driving force behind this initiative. Pooling business application data is critical to enterprises’ futures. Companies that want to make the most of advanced analytics will need to access previously disparate data sources. Organizations must break down their internal silos between functions to increase enterprise agility—and technology must follow suit.

    Partnership Evolution

    Why now? It’s easier for different vendors to integrate with one another when business applications reside in the cloud. Different companies can build APIs to facilitate connections with one another. Vendors can also ensure their customers are running on consistent managed environments, which simplifies connections between different vendors. Customers also can more easily change vendors in the cloud era, which puts increased pressure on tech companies to provide products that meet enterprise needs, which means they must integrate more broadly.

    These companies also can build upon the foundation of their individual partnerships to form broader alliances. Both SAP and Adobe have individual strategic partnerships with Microsoft, and those relationships likely make it easier for them to forge a broader-reaching agreement.

    Finally, if tech companies don’t partner with one another, other firms will come along to do the job. A fleet of businesses including Informatica, Sapho and Mulesoft (now a part of Salesforce) exist to help enterprises create and operationalize connections between data sources. If vendors choose not to build these integrations, customers will find a way to create critical connections and may even abandon siloed products for more open alternatives.

    How Far Does This Go?

    There are still some fairly clear (if unstated) boundaries that haven’t yet been crossed. For example, Salesforce’s partnership work with Microsoft could be best described as minimal, ever since Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Salesforce fell through and Microsoft beat out Salesforce to acquire LinkedIn. Similarly, AWS and its hyperscale cloud competitors aren’t doing much in the way of strategic partnerships with one another, and are instead content to keep sniping at each other through public announcements and new product launches.

    As such, enterprises should expect there will still be barriers to full and true openness among their technology vendors, and those barriers won’t be overcome easily. Case in point: For all of Microsoft’s talk of openness with the Open Data Initiative, the data lake in which customers are sharing their information with SAP, Adobe and Microsoft is hosted in Azure, not another cloud. If Azure remains the sole storage option for this initiative, it seems logical that not every Microsoft competitor will play ball and participate, since doing so would drive use of one cloud platform.

    However, there are some glimmers of hope on the horizon for broader collaboration between major cloud players AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM. All of them are now members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and are working on the Kubernetes open source container orchestration software. As Kubernetes forms the foundation for an increasing number of modern applications, it’s possible we’ll see major cloud providers opt to work more closely with one another on building foundational components of application infrastructure.

    While such collaboration is far from friction-free, it does provide opportunity and a foundation for these firms and others to increase their collaboration, which we expect will be more important in the future as enterprises continue to embrace hybrid- and multi-cloud deployments.

    — Blair Hanley Frank

  • DevOps Storytime: The Line, The Loop and The Cube

    DevOps Storytime: The Line, The Loop and The Cube

    In a time not so long ago, but long enough to be before the mainstreaming of magical ideas such as “configuration as code” or “platform as a service (PaaS),” in a period where the enterprise IT shops were ruled by the one-two punch of Six Sigma and ITIL, there were three magical artifacts sought by the people who spent their working days lubricating the gears of the consulting, development and operations factories throughout the lands of corporatedom.

    The three mystical objects consisted of The Line, The Loop and The Cube. Each were first envisioned as possibilities by “automation zealots” as they roamed the corporate cubicle farms in vain attempts to provide enlightenment to their enterprise brethren. As the quest to drive evermore efficacy out of technology shops of all shapes and sizes has progressed, strategists, designers, architects and developers have been slowly creating these possibilities into being. Much like the legend of the Deathly Hallows, if these once-mythical objects come fully into being, the enterprise that can behold all three of the artifacts can create the nigh invincible product/technology factory as it becomes the master of time.

    Continuous Integration – The Line

    In conceptual land, The Line was just what it sounds like: a singular line, never bending and never deviating from its course. It connected the space from development to production. The idea of The Line has been around a long time—long enough for many shops to now have working implementations running as standard operating procedure. But it wasn’t always this way.

    circlesquareIn reality land, The Line was a patchwork of open-source frameworks, glue code, xml files and a few engineers unlucky enough to be tagged with role of “Build Master.” Woven together by the Build Master, these transformative robots and would take coders’ output, compile it into a workable build that merges all of the developed functionality, run and validate test harnesses against it. Once validated, the newly minted build then would be promoted to the higher-level environment, ultimately moving from dev to test, test to stage and, lastly, from stage to prod.

    The tools to build and manage The Line have been through many iterations since it first came into use and many shops have progressed far enough into the advanced territories of The Line to call themselves masters of the once-mythical Line. The shops exploiting The Line are now so prolific and the tools have advanced enough that it’s no longer an onerous task to get change-resistant enterprises to try it out.

    The Line has transformed from mythical artifact to concrete reality so much so that the believers now outnumber the holdouts. The end result is that shops not embracing the basics of continuous integration risk losing credibility in the eyes of their staff and any potential recruits.

    OODA is a Way of Being – The Loop

    When someone starts talking about “getting the right information to the right person at the right time,” that person is talking in fairly vague terms about the the long sought-after grail of The Loop. The Line is a good start, but the robot watching the line is only as smart as the humans who created and configured it. This is one of the many reasons to chase The Loop.

    What is the use in “shifting left” if you can’t get the alerts and metrics to the people who care? How can the metrics from “shifting left” be acted upon if they can’t be pushed into the view of those who can act upon them? The Loop is the answer, because it is the mechanism to determine many things beyond “the right person.” The Loop knows how to get messages to all interested and responsible parties. The Loop has mechanisms to account for an ever-fluid organizational structure and backup delivery methods for backup delivery methods.

    All enterprises have feedback loops. The key differentiator for moving toward mastery of The Loop is the degree to which you have automated the and abstracted the mechanisms inside the feedback loops.

    Many people and enterprises are resigned to life without The Loop. The signs are easy to see if you know where and how to look. Are mail distribution lists and org charts always a pain in your organization? Are executive-led fire drills the norm when systems are down? Are system alerts dropping on the floor rather than getting to the first responders and application owners?

    If you answered yes to any of the above, your enterprise has not committed to developing and leveraging The Loop. Basic “loop-like” alerting functionality is commonly available from alerting vendors, but true mastery of The Loop cannot be achieved without robust identity management and synchronization technology. Without this critical integration point, alerts and information flow can only be as effective as your manual processes that update the myriad data islands in each and every alerting system within your enterprise.

    When enterprises grow, being able to have the enterprise robot army seamlessly drive information flow without requiring sieve-like manual processes is also the key to tightening the enterprise OODA (observe, orient, decide and act) loop. Done with full mastery, one could imagine the possibility of acquiring the last of the three magical grails and maybe the most sought after: The Cube.

    Perceiving the Matrix – The Cube

    The story of The Cube begins with a question: “What defines the so-called ‘right’ information?” When enterprise technology and design evangelists talk of The Cube they often wax poetic and describe it as all things to all enterprise people at every level within the organization. It provides not only the integrated matrix of the fully faceted enterprise from an organization perspective, but also extends beyond operational information rights into decision rights, affinity groupings and cross-functional teams.

    cubeWe have begun to see promising beginnings of The Cube pop up within medium and large enterprises through popularizing algorithms and outfitting teams with ubiquitous mission control-style dashboards and screens in team areas. But it is only when these dashboards can integrate and harmonize wide varieties of development, operational and business KPI data that we will be able to claim that we have delivered full and timely context (i.e., “the Right Information”) to the staff sailing the enterprise ship.

    The hard part of creating The Cube is not so much the technology required to achieve its development and integration. The really difficult part is coaxing the organizational will to define and maintain the KPI taxonomies for each organizational unit and the integration points between them. Given that a fully mastered Loop doesn’t necessarily understand how KPIs, infrastructure and applications interrelate and affect each other, the Loop will forever be but a required stepping stone to The Cube.

    Will a Unicorn be Required for Unification?

    The current landscape of open-source and vendor tools to wield and tie together these ungainly enterprise models may not, as of yet, be sophisticated enough to both integrate and simplify the provisioning and cultivation of The Lines, The Loops and The Cubes. The sultry, siren-like call of the Unicorns, however, will likely beckon the cloud builders of today and tomorrow to create not just development to deployment pipelines, but also fully integrated feedback loops with intelligent understanding for how the data connects to form perspective.

    It is odd to think about, because with the idealized future state so close to actual possibility, it begs a new set of questions. Hordes of IT professionals around the world have been working to find faster and more fool-proof ways to deliver meaningful perspective into the hands of decision makers and first responders. We are so close now to that mission being accomplished that there are a few instances of the perspective itself not only being generated by “the robot” but also being handed to “the robot” to take the necessary remediation steps.

    The ending we are approaching, much like the beginning, circles around a question: “If we truly automate all the things, will there be any more work to do?”