Software is eating the world

Today is my last day with my employer EMC. I have spent four great years selling the virtues of EMC's impressive portfolio of information infrastructure solutions and I have done so during a very defining time for storage vendors and infrastructure vendors generally. 

We are now squarely in the digital age. Businesses are transforming their go to markets through their use of technology - moreover, software. Software -more and more- is the point of interaction, the point of sale and the point of care for our customers. Great software, creates great digital customer experiences and companies that don't understand this will become irrelevant.

This leaves Infrastructure with two very big challenges left to solve- scale and cost. We used to be focused on building highly resilient and bespoke computer systems that guaranteed availability and performance, even to the point that all other design considerations would be compromised to accommodate them. In the digital age and global age, performance and availability are not enough. Digital Infrastructure platforms have to perform and remain available at scale whereby the architecture also delivers an exponentially lower cost per unit of compute/storage/throughput.

Large digital platforms are now built on infrastructure made up of commodity hardware layered with levels of abstraction and automation software that help define operational capabilities. The individual components that now deliver the overall infrastructure are cheap, expendable and unimportant. It is the software that brings these individual components together to deliver an operational infrastructure platform. It is the software that is strategic to the business because it is also the differentiation from which competitive edge can be derived.

EMC are transitioning their business to reflect this shift and with the combination of very successful infrastructure software businesses like VMWare, RSA and Pivotal within the wider EMC federation I think they have a great chance of helping their customers transform alongside them. I wish EMC and my old colleagues well on this journey. 

So why did I leave? I have decided to take a break from infrastructure, specifically storage. As much as I find scale and cost interesting, the conversations with customers became a little uni-dimensional. Infrastructure is getting bigger and cheaper that is a fact. Sourcing bigger and cheaper blobs of infrastructure isn't a problem for customers. Infrastructure is getting bigger and cheaper, year over year, and now the main vendors are locked in a race to the bottom line. It's a noble mission, and one where a great deal of value can be still be added, but I am hoping that my next adventure (with my new employer) will open up very different conversations with my customers. 

My new employer is BMC Software and having recently privatised and re-branded, I picked up a huge amount of ambition and passion for their mission in the digital age. BMC Software are focused on the service aspect of technology as opposed to the technology itself and this is because, more so than ever, IT is about bringing together many highly aggregated component parts to run as a holistic service. IT Sandboxes and islands don't get designed into enterprises anymore- it's just not cost effective or architecturally sound. Business are aggregating their resources into private clouds, scaling them and in some cases merging them with public clouds. BMC provides the glue (software) that brings all of this together as an automated, measurable, accountable and operational service to the business. It is my hope that, with BMC, the conversations I have with customers will not only be value and service driven but will also help grow and deepen the connection between business and technology.

Wish me luck and thanks for reading :)

Chancey