Incumbents have started to write blog posts pooh-pooing the undeniable web-scale “rebellion” in the enterprise. The word rebellionreminds me ofthe talk I gave two years ago at BriForum London: “The Arab Spring of Enterprise IT”. Most revolutions start at the fringes, until they become too big to ignore. Think of the x86 server revolution, which powered by Linux and Windows, annihilated the Unix server industry overnight. Remember iSCSI and NFS movements, and how they stifled block storage and Fiber Channel in the enterprise. The ruling class is invariably in denial of rebellions, until a critical mass of a powerful grassroots movement consumes its very throne.
History serves as a powerful guidepost for me in business building. Big Data is a case in point. Hadoop — a web-scale technology and a father of this overall web-scale movement — is massive in the enterprise, and is shaking incumbents like Teradata, Oracle, and Netezza at the very core of their business.
Linux was baked in web-scale datacenters, and so was MySQL. Google’s efforts not only made Linux and MySQL robust, but also made SATA controllers and SATA disks reliable commodities. IDE drives, IDE ribbon cables, and Linux 2.2 give me the shivers. Server-based flash was baked at scale within the data centers ofGoogle, Facebook, and numerous web-scale properties much before they were being discussed in the enterprise. Had it been left in the hands of SAN companies, expensive SAS and esoteric OSes would have continued to cream the enterprise. Incumbents want to maintain status quo because web-scale advancements — and percolation of web-scale in the enterprise — shakes them at the very core of their high-margin change-averse business.
Read the entire article here,Web-scale IT: “Are we there yet?”
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