“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F. Kennedy
A relatively new term that has entered the lexicon of modern IT is Web-scale systems. Credit to Cameron Haight from Gartner for coining it a couple of years ago. I have spent a lot of my time in the last couple of years in working with marquee names worldwide on gradually percolating these practices into their critical business lines & applications. However, my goal today is not to define this loosely understood concept but to rather speak to it from a business perspective in this post. We will get to the technology prongs of web-scale in followup posts.
The provenance of the term “WebScale IT” is the recognition of the fact that the Web scale giants led by the Big Four – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have built robust platforms (as opposed to standalone or loosely federated applications) that have not only contributed to their outstanding business success but have also led to the creation of (open source) software technologies that enable business systems to operate at massive scale in terms of billions of users and at millions of systems. They have done all this while constantly churning out innovative offerings while still continuously adapting & learning from customer feedback. No mean feat this.
These four are followed by two other new age giants – Netflix & LinkedIn. The Netflix stack is one of the primary open source projects that enable the creation of microservices & loosely coupled applications at scale. W
As an analyst from Citi remarked a few months ago – “It is impossible to overtake them*”.
* – How Four Companies took over the internet
http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/12/technology/techonomy-big-four/
The term is apt since no Fortune x00 has been able to match this velocity of change and quite a few have even seen their business models upended by the blazing speed at which these four giants have been able to cause tectonic shifts in the landscape. A few examples, Amazon AWS in Cloud Computing, Apple iTunes in the music business, Google’s Gmail (just to name one in their amazing panoply of offerings) & Facebook’s relentless march to be the personal collaboration platform. Google and Facebook have spun off a number of open source projects that now form the basis of distributed computing & massively scalable compute & data architecture.
[Image Courtesy – FastCompany]
How has all this been possible? In large degree due to visionary leadership backed by a culture of risk taking and innovation.
Gartner rightly proclaims that by 2017, 50% of all global enterprises will adopt web-scale architectures & practices in some shape or form.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2675916
The point has been well made that every business now is a software business. The ability of an enterprise to compete with it’s rivals depends largely on the quality of information systems, data analytics as well as a culture that rewards risk taking and internal entrepreneurship.
The below five business reasons make it impossible for an CXO to neglect the adoption of web-scale practices in at-least a few critical applications –
1. Digital Transformation – Every large Fortune x00 enterprise is under growing pressure to transform lines of business or their entire enterprise into a digital operation. I define digital in this context as being able to – “adapt high levels of automation while enabling the business to support multiple channels by which products and services can be delivered to customers. Further the culture of digital encourages constant innovation and agility resulting high levels of customer & employee satisfaction.”
2. Smart Data & Analytics – Web-scale techniques ensure that the right data is in the hands of the right employee at the right time so that contextual services can be offered in real time to customers. This has the effect of optimizing existing workflows while also enabling the creation of new business models.
3. Cost Savings – Oddly enough, the move to web-scale only reduces business and IT costs. You not only end up doing more with less employees due to higher levels of automation but also are able to constantly cut costs due to adopting technologies like Cloud Computing which enable one to cut CapEx and OpEx. Almost all webscale IT is dominated by open source technologies & APIs, which are much more cost effective than proprietaty platforms.
4. A Culture of Collaboration – The most vibrant enterprises that have implemented web-scale practices not only offer “IT/Business As A Service” but also have instituted strong cultures of symbiotic relationships between customers (both current & prospective), employees , partners and developers etc.
5. Building for the Future – The core idea behind implementing web-scale architecture and data management practices is “Be disruptive in your business or be disrupted by competition”. Web-scale practices enable the building of business platforms around which ecosystems can be created and then sustained based on increasing revenue.
The virtuous feedback loop encouraged by constant customer data & feedback enables these platforms to behave like growing organisms. Now that the stage has been laid for “Why Web-scale?”, I will cover the technology prongs from a high level in the next post.