Innovation is not over — it’s evolving

CONSIDER THE MESSAGES we’ve been digesting during the past few months. Layoffs continue to ease the Silicon Valley freeway commute, enterprise IT spending remains lackluster, and in the stock market, the IT industry’s pulse is just short of flat-lining.

Then there is the ever-popular discussion around trade shows. Events that were formerly industry landmarks are sinking into an uneasy malaise where attendees, organizers, vendors, and media come away asking if there’s any hope in the horizon.

IDG’s Agenda conference earlier this month is a case in point — attendees were still nursing a downturn hangover. This prevailing pessimism led some commentators to make grandiose statements about the “end of technology innovation as we know it.”

Aside from the fact that vendors continue to spend billions of dollars on R&D each year, what other evidence suggests innovation is alive and well?

Have a chat with systems integrators such as Accenture, IBM Consulting, Dimension Data, or EDS and you get a solid understanding that Web services standards including XML and SOAP really are mature. Frameworks built on top of these standards offer a critical method of converting intellectual property into tangible assets (see ” SIs retool Web services “).

In the infrastructure development space, storage networking architectures are evolving at an urgent pace. Technologists at IBM, Veritas, EMC, Legato, NetApp, and Cisco are trying to simplify the escalating costs and complexities of data management. Every CTO knows the stockpile of enterprise data will eventually become impossible to manage within existing budget constraints. IBM’s Autonomic Computing and Sun’s N1 strategies are good examples. These companies are counting on enterprises realizing that self-healing or self-managing systems are not a luxury. There simply will not be enough hours in the day to keep large environments running.

Then we have the security space, where fear alone isn’t the purchasing motivation it once was. But talk about simplicity of security management and ROI, and you have a dialogue. Large anti-virus outfits are reinventing themselves as one-stop enterprise security shops, but look out for innovation in other quarters.

Emerging security management outfits are developing platforms capable of aggregating security message alerts from disparate devices. Coupled with policy and management capabilities, technologies in this space address the same problem targeted by the infrastructure and storage companies: complexity.

It’s back to the future for the one-throat-to-choke model that used to work when a proprietary stack offered easier integration and price advantages. Now as we move toward a future in which loosely coupled apps run across widely distributed networks and out to all manner of pervasive client devices, tackling complexity is paramount.

The level of innovation required to deliver on this vision is immense. But as a well-known Redmond CEO asserted earlier this year, economic downturns stoke the innovation fire rather than douse it.