The new IT vs. the old IT

I keep getting the feeling we’re on the brink of another momentous industry shift. Sure, I can think of some big reasons. But sometimes, it’s the small stuff that drives the point home.

Last week was a study in contrast between old and new IT. On Monday, I attended a Dell event where the main purpose was to introduce a new line of PowerEdge servers — and, without irony, convince the world that Dell is actually a services company. As I looked around at the audience of bored analysts and reporters slumped over their black ThinkPads, asking rote questions about speeds and feeds and revenue, I half expected a young female athlete to come running down the aisle and hurl a hammer at Michael Dell.

[ Read “4 ways consumerization threatens Dell and HP” by InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman. | What’s up with Windows 8? The initial reaction from InfoWorld’s J. Peter Bruzzese can be found here: “Windows 8 Consumer Preview: ‘Windows Frankenstein.'” | Subscribe to InfoWorld’s Consumerization of IT newsletter. ]

The scene was a perfect symbol of “the old IT”: We might give it a new spin, but we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing because we can’t imagine anything better to do.

The next day I took a cab across town with Doug Dineley, head of the InfoWorld Test Center, and visited a startup called Nodeable that offers a SaaS application wrapped in a Twitter metaphor to monitor virtual servers on Amazon Web Services. Nodeable plumbs Amazon’s APIs for event data to boil up key performance indicators for dashboards and — it says — will supply tools to help developers take control of operations. In the process, programmers can provision their own dev, test, and deploy environments, and operators can single-handedly manage dozens or hundreds of servers.

Nodeable’s quest is emblematic of the “new IT”: We all know the world is headed to the cloud and we know we have the ingenuity to provide an important part of the tooling, even if we haven’t totally hashed out where we fit in.

The day after that, at the O’Reilly Strata conference, a live wire by the name of Jesper Andersen, general manager of Bloom, gave a killer data analysis and visualization presentation contrasting San Francisco’s upper and lower Haight Street. As the session description stated, “We’ll integrate basic public data from the city, street and mapping data from Open Street Maps, real estate and rental listings data, data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram, and analyze photographs of streets from mapping services to create a holistic view of one street and see what we can understand from this.”

That we did. Fascinating conclusions about crime, happiness, human behavior, and more came bubbling up from Andersen’s patchwork of data sources. It was the bright promise of big data right before your eyes. Did Andersen’s exercise have some obvious moneymaking application? Not really — mostly it seemed to confirm things we already know (such as where on Haight to open a bar and where to open a shoe store). But the potential seemed boundless.

On a far less upbeat note, that same day, I got wind of J. Peter Bruzzese’s initial reaction to Windows 8 Consumer Preview. InfoWorld’s resident Microsoft loyalist was truly upset by what Microsoft had foisted on the world. We all knew Microsoft was making a valiant attempt to integrate the good old Windows desktop with Metro and unite mobile and desktop functionality under one UI. But the result, according to Peter, was barely usable — a “Frankenstein” OS.

Peter sounded betrayed: “I’ve been telling my wife for weeks that I was getting a Windows 8 tablet rather than the iPad 3. I may be changing that decision.” This from a guy who staunchly defended Vista! Microsoft has become the epitome of an old-school company that knows it needs to move boldly ahead, but can’t disentangle itself from its own legacy. And Microsoft is the company Dell and HP are counting on to keep them relevant to consumers in the new mobile era.

In case you’re wondering, I realize that fancy devops schemes and dazzling big data experiments need hardware and operating systems to run. But that infrastructure is getting relentlessly commoditized. With the exception of Apple, IBM, and a handful of others, the top tier of the old guard seems to be faltering. Instead, the energy and ideas are coming from a new wave of entrepreneurs who — in a virtualized, mobilized, consumerized, cloud-enabled world — like to “think different.”

The visionaries who survive and thrive are going to usher in an exciting era. So the tech industry cycle has always gone — we just happen to be entering a new one with boundless access to compute power and data gushing from an unprecedented diversity of sources. So strap in, hang on, and enjoy the ride.

This article, “The new IT vs. the old IT,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog, and for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.