The Enterprise Chasm

IT faces more complexity and risk today than in years past. Evidenced by the nearly 80% of cybersecurity professionals who believe their job is harder now than just 2 years ago. Peers point to a combination of new IT initiatives in cloud and mobile computing, increasingly dangerous cyber-threats and supporting legacy point tools. In Netskope’s Cloud report, the average enterprise utilizes 715 cloud applications. 715! Furthermore, 92% of these applications are not enterprise ready. An environment where control was the standard has undergone change at a dizzying pace. The resulting financial, security and operational risks to the company and the inherent data silos formed as they proliferate have created an enterprise chasm.

Larry Ellison described in Softwar, “Building an integrated system out of several different software products that were never designed to work together is a very difficult task. At Oracle, we used to sell and deliver these best-of-breed systems; selling was easy, delivery was hard. IBM has thousands of consultants eager to help you make it work. The more complex the integration project the more likely it will be late and over budget. It may even fail completely. And in the end it’s the customer who assumes the financial risk for the success or failure of these projects. This best-of-breed software product assembly approach is absolutely unique to the computer industry.”

This was 2001 when the Oracle eBusiness suite consisted of 4 products — ERP, CRM, Oracle Workflow and Application Object Library. How do you approach the exponential explosion of information along with it’s financial, security and operational implications?

Application Software Networks

The future of the enterprise will be transformed by application software networks as they break down the operational and data silos. IT’s tool belt is already full of software and APIs that will serve as the picks and shovels of this transformation. Treating software like nodes that may be dynamically related to each other opens up the profound design possibilities of network architecture.

With a paradigm shift away from the solution stack towards an open network architecture, that architecture facilitates any application or functional service to directly connect and interoperate with another through open APIs and standard protocols. Network architecture is more efficient and flexible, as well as less expensive, than traditional stacked enterprise IT architectures. The “future is about enabling the deployment and consumption of cloud services, not installing, configuring, and managing stacks” as As Matthew Lodge, VP of Cloud Services at VMware points out. A network architecture may be one of the most pivotal changes an IT professional can design and implement.

Network effects have transformed communication paradigms from the phone & fax to Facebook and Twitter. In a global and fluid economy, why not at the application layer?

Andy Weissman at USV describes a concept he calls the No Stack Startup which affirms the application network design and takes it a step further. “Some characteristics all these share is that they use other platforms and APIs to cobble together a service and in doing so rely almost wholly on those platforms and APIs for every function of the business other than the one they can be the best at. And, maybe more importantly, they all are using those other platforms to define their users experiences.

Even better, in relying on the UX of other platforms, the No Stack startup also relies on the users of those platforms. The platforms themselves may have different and even stronger network effects than previously imagined (though in different ways), as springboards to other services

The most recognizable example is Uber. Uber has taken an network architecture approach and built it’s service on the following apis Google Maps, Checkr background checks, Braintree payments, and Twilio texts. The best way to do business isn’t to build it all in-house. Top companies are increasingly piecing together a composite of APIs from specialized companies.

If applications are networked, the information is dynamically sync’ed across applications and you’re able to leverage the UX of other platforms, you’ll see the delta between the idea and the execution of an integrated ecosystem disappear.

The ubiquitous need for storage and messaging has turned those tools into the epicenter for application software networks. Dropbox for Business, Box and Slack aren’t just their respective file sharing or messaging platforms, but also the networks that have been built on top of them. For example:

• Contracts that are signed in Docusign are saved to Dropbox and synced to salesforce
• Development files live in Dropbox where the workflow is managed in Asana and built and deployed to Azure or Heroku
• Automatic notifications of incidents on pager duty are pulled into the Slack’s communication platform
• Security for EFSS is networked through Okta for Identity Management, Encase for eDiscovery, Splunk for SIEM, and Adallom for DLP
• Integrations into 300,000 (Dropbox), 100 (Slack) and 70,000 (Box) applications

The stacked garden of the enterprise has ended, and has evolved to a new networked paradigm. One that threads together different tools, platforms, devices, and (most importantly) people.