Natural selection

After I made my case for IT consolidation — in sum, that it will be unavoidable, necessary, painful, sweeping, and marvelous — I got e-mail from InfoWorld readers and from fellow journalists asking me when it would happen. For some, if it isn’t happening now, it isn’t worth paying attention to. I’m supposed to be ahead of the curve, but those who resist my crystal-ball gazing have a point. What effects of consolidation can we see right now?

Start with people. I believe that an interesting phenomenon presages, perhaps even models, the way technology consolidation will play out. PATH’sOdedNoy, a member of InfoWorld CTO Advisory Council, put a point on it for me in the hallway at CTO Forum. He noted that far fewer people were at the conference, but that our smaller numbers was a good thing because the attendees were talking with one another. He also noted a greater proportion of women in attendance than usual.

Oded is right. CTO Forum is always a worthwhile conference for me, but this year’s stood out. It was an intensely thoughtful and collaborative gathering. The best way I can summarize it is that everybody came to work. It was not a junket or a perk for anyone I met. As for Oded’s observation about the greater participation of women, it’s certainly accurate, but I’m not qualified to interpret it. I hope it means that consolidation is knocking down some arbitrary cultural barriers in addition to the technical ones.

The economy gets most of the blame for job cuts, with corporate greed and lack of regard for workers cited as other explanations. In a way, these reasons are a cover, just surface reasons for consolidation. The unacknowledged rationale for consolidation is one that experienced businesspeople and technologists have understood all along: Consolidation is good. The periodic housecleaning of human and technical middleware doesn’t count; that’s usually just for show. And some cuts made early in the recession were perhaps reckless. But in all of the cases with which I’m familiar, later culling was done more carefully and purposefully. For what it’s worth, this thinned herd at CTO Forum was noticeably stronger.

CTO Forum is a good external example. But turning inward, I’m moved to look at my own management. It is a mark of stature in IT to roll your eyes, doodle, yawn or — worst of all — check your e-mail during gatherings of corporate executives. Whomever is sent in to fly IT’s flag at these meetings is expected to regale the technical staff with cynical jokes about empty suits and wasted time. Recently, I shifted gears so abruptly that co-workers remarked on it. I became interested in the pie charts, research statistics, and sales trends that used to put me to sleep. It certainly helps that I’m now grown-up enough to sit still and listen. But I don’t think an executive could get away with presenting the same slide deck at the Q1 and Q2 quarterly meetings. If he or she did, there would be an empty seat for the Q3 gathering.

Jon Udell has noticed a split in the IT blogging world between those who stick with it and those who bail out. The same happened in the online magazine space. I found myself sharing tables at major vendor briefings with some college kids writing IT reviews and analysis between classes. A few of those Web publications (what hardware vendors call “enthusiast sites”) are still cranking out great content and remain on my regular reading list. Most, however, will be consolidated out through what Jon calls “the link economy.”

Blogspace is an especially compelling case of an engineered organization. The technology brutally and automatically selects out the incompetent, irrelevant, and dishonest. Jon and I debate about whether blogspace is naturally impervious to corruption. It certainly has a built-in resistance to it. It is an engineered community that’s worth studying as a model even if you’re not a fan of blogs as a business tool.

Focusing the concept of selection down to the technology level, Novell’s Winston Bumpus promotes a simple sniff test for determining the relevance of an emerging standard: It saves you money, it makes you money, or it’s mandated by the government. Short and sweet, perfectly distilled, that phrase should be the standard. If the Bumpus Principle or a comparably simple equivalent were applied to every technology in place at every company, IT infrastructures would become much stronger.

Selection can be steered, pulled one way or another by a powerful interest. This is a stellar opportunity to knock off a competitor and shrug off ethical questions: Hey, it wasn’t us. It was natural consolidation. The market made an adjustment that just happened to work in our favor.

I don’t see this kind of misuse succeeding in the long term. What gives me the most hope is the increasing number of successful, brilliant, small vendors and the greater visibility of internal think-tank projects. Three pet examples of this from my recent experience are Raxco, Newisys, and HP Zero-Latency Enterprise (ZLE). Raxco is a little company that makes a powerful disk defragmenter for Windows. Newisys designed the reference platform for AMD’s Opteron 64-bit CPU. HP’sZLE project is a real-time storage, messaging, and retrieval system that’s obviously the right way to manage massive amounts of rapidly changing data.

I’ll write more about each of these in future columns, but I am constantly surprised by the innovation that is rising to the top after being invisible for a long time. Natural selection has a way of bringing the strongest to the front of the herd.