The first in a series of extended iQ features introducing the burgeoning and fast-emerging “New IT Economy” and its potential and probable impact on today’s businesses.
A couple of years back, the US comedian Chris Rock famously commented that you know the world is going
crazy when its best golfer is black, its most famous rapper is white, Switzerland holds the America’s Cup,
France accuses the US of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in
America are named Dick (Cheney), Bush (George W), and Colon (sic. Colin Powell).
We wouldn’t mention it, but if he’s theoretically correct (if perhaps not politically so) there’s every chance
that the technology business has finally lost it too. From seemingly nowhere, among the major forces in
the global IT mix are suddenly an Internet search engine, an online book seller (!), some previously unthinkable and positively unholy alliances, and an operating system that began life not in Silicon Valley, but in the back bedroom of some Finnish hobbyist who was named after a character from Peanuts (honestly).
So? What’s new? IT is constantly in a state of flux and moving at 100mph, right? Change is a given and simply the tech industry’s way of keeping us all interested in something that (whisper it quietly) is actually quite dull, quite a lot of the time.
Well, that may be true. Usually. But apparently not this time. Because, according to many of IT’s most influential thinkers, the significant and sweeping changes currently taking place in how technologies are sold, consumed, and even thought about, could signal the early throes of perhaps the biggest, most fundamental shift seen in the industry since the advent of the PC.
Indeed, Ketan Karia, CMO at leading open source database management player Ingres, describes what is happening currently as a “tectonic shift” in the IT world: a whole New IT Economy. A whole New IT Economy? Wow. But what and where is it exactly, and what’s driving it? Demand? Supply? The financial crisis? ‘New’ technology models like the Cloud? Virtualisation? Consolidation? SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Open Source?
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