Enterprise IT Is Dead
Infrastructure is just a commodity now, and data is the new infrastructure.
This week’s How Hard Can It Be podcast features my conversation with G20 Ventures co-founder Bill Wiberg. After a walk-through of Bill’s story in our first segment, we talked about what I called the “death of IT,” specifically the implications of the unprecedented commoditization of compute, networking, and storage infrastructure that’s transforming the enterprise IT landscape right now. As more and more basic IT functionality is absorbed by public, private, and hybrid cloud service providers, legacy IT vendors increasingly find themselves unable to justify the premium pricing their shiny boxes and venerable brands have commanded for decades. Even as a new generation of “hyperconverged” hardware vendors beats them in a race to zero, a new generation of virtualization software providers seems intent on rendering them irrelevant.
Other than that, business is good.
Bill’s perspective on the problem is informed by a couple decades of experience. He’s an accomplished executive and 16-year venture investor passionate about technical innovation, and helping entrepreneurs win. He has extensive operating experience, culminating in his role as the President of Lucent Technology’s $5 billion Cellular and PCS Wireless Networks division. Prior to that he held senior management positions in product development and marketing at AT&T, Bell Labs, and Lucent, and made the change to venture investing in 2000.
The decline of IT-driven competitive advantage
What’s really changed, in Bill’s view, is the strategic role of IT as a differentiator between businesses, a source of “sustainable competitive advantage” in the B-school parlance. Instead, the focus has shifted to data, fast becoming the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. Companies who excel in the creation, care, cultivation, and analysis of data — in the distillation of actionable insights from the “data exhaust” thrown off by most modern businesses — will be in the best position to win.
The centrality of data is the bridge to the ascendant importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML.) We went on to discuss this in some detail, as well as the relationship between startups leveraging ML to augment a human customer interface, and those investing to displace the human front end in its entirety.
I really enjoyed the conversation and the chance to get to know Bill, listen for yourself and be sure and subscribe to the podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes, PocketCast or your favorite platform.
