In 2014, the IT industry is transforming radically and with it our societies, and the business models of our clients: after the main frame age, the client-server age, we are now moving into the cloud age – the age of the always-on, ever-connected, Internet-of-things-driven, network society. I have just spent a few days in the US at the CSC Global Sales Conference and want to share my learning. At CSC, we have developed the concept of the outside-in enterprise to encapsulate that.
As we are moving from an inside-out to an outside-in enterprise, value propositions change dramatically. Do watch the following little video by the Leading Edge Forum, which captures the spirit of the outside-in idea:
This core idea of thinking our processes from the outside-in translates into the five big conversations that we need to have as societies and corporations around Apps Modernization: how do I move my existing business process applications to evergreen, as-a-service models? Big Data: how do I leverage different sources of data to drive my business? But also how do I assure data protection and data privacy? Cloudification: how do I orchestrate the different internal and external clouds that my IT landscape relies on? Mobile: How do I assure that my employees and stakeholders have secured access to the applications and data they need wherever they need it? And Cybersecurity: How do I ensure security in a world that is not defined anymore through medieval moats and “firewalls” but where security needs to be baked into the processes, no matter where they take place?
Outside-in is an idea that is business and not technology driven. It is so big, that no one can pursue it alone, but it does need an orchestrated approach. Only when you bring together players like Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. can you succeed in our age of transformation.
My big intellectual takeaways at the conference were, to learn more about our cloud orchestration capabilities, basically the core governance instrument of the outside-in enterprise. We call it our service-mesh agility platform (http://www.servicemesh.com/). I was very impressed by our big data offering (http://www.infochimps.com/), by the philosophy of mobility first that really makes a difference, when you are executing your mobile strategy, and by our partnership with HCL (http://www.hcltech.com/) for apps modernization – the global apps modernization market will be worth almost a trillion Euros in the upcoming years, and it is an issue that all of our clients are facing. The “sexier” SMAC-Market (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) “only” a tenth of that.
In the coming cloud age, enterprises and public agencies need strategies that bring together three discrete capabilities: a deep understanding of business needs, next generation architectural acumen and orchestration skills, and technological excellence in very specific fields such as cloud, big data, and mobile. We cannot do this alone.
