The future belongs to the young and nimble

Last week’s blade server shoot-out — an InfoWorld Test Center comparison of Westmere blades from Dell, HP, and IBM — provides yet another object lesson on the narrowing gap between the technology available to small businesses and large enterprises. Even the control system we used to provide a baseline, the Supermicro SuperBlade, is perfectly adequate for many small businesses, with a shockingly low base configuration of $2,581 (including two blades).

You can even argue that the most interesting tech innovation today now targets small business rather than large enterprises.

[ See InfoWorld’s 2010 blade shoot-out with the top blade servers from Dell, HP, and IBM, all outfitted with Intel’s brand-spanking-new Westmere chip. | For the latest on cloud computing, see David Linthicum’s Cloud Computing blog. ]

As Amazon distinguished engineer James Hamilton once noted, the power density of blade servers often fails to fit into the architecture of big data centers, and that’s not the only advanced technology large enterprises have trouble digesting. The three basic varieties of cloud services, SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and IaaS (infrastructure as a service), have all found more favor in small, nimble businesses rather than in big companies where control is top of mind. And open source software, which has become a hotbed of innovation, often has trouble penetrating large enterprises due to commercial software lock-in and paranoia about the legal and security risks of open source solutions.

A little over a year ago, Dave Rosenberg, the former CEO of an open source software company, wrote a great article for InfoWorld entitled “Cloud computing to the max.” His company used cloud service provider Contegix for all application development, Rackspace for Web server infrastructure, Salesforce for CRM, Amazon S3 for product downloads, and (after trying multiple solutions) Google Apps Premier Enterprise for e-mail and collaborative documents.

His conclusion: “Based on my experience over the last two years, I estimate that companies can easily offload 50 to 100 percent of their needs to cloud-based services with minimal business impact and near zero risk.” Not surprisingly, Rosenberg says that cloud services don’t make the cut for applications that require high performance with low latency (Westmere blades, anyone?), but that he would absolutely go deep into the cloud again for his next startup.

Now compare that approach against what I hear from many large enterprises. Like, “cloud services are too risky,” or “I’m opting for a private cloud instead” (whatever that may mean to them). Or more practically, “how the hell am I supposed to track thousands of employees using cloud applications all over the Internet when managing local user identity is such a mess?” When it comes to small open source projects, which have grown organically at a rapid pace as enterprise developers collaborate across boundaries, I still hear CIOs say, “I’m not going to trust that code. I don’t know where it came from.”

After last year’s violent contraction of the economy, I get the sense that many large enterprises are hunkering down and avoiding the cost of change more than ever. If so, they’re going to miss out on some exciting stuff. To take one example, a number of startups are approaching “big data” in a new way, using Hadoop and other non-SQL approaches to extract value from very large historical databases. One of those companies, Revolution Computing, which specializes in the R language for statistical analysis, just hired as its CEO Norman Nie, the founder of SPSS. “The future belongs to the young and nimble,” he says.

We live in an age where many large institutions are not only too big to fail, but too big to thrive. It’s become a cliché to say that small businesses deliver most of job growth. Now more than ever the tech industry is providing the tools for those businesses to leap ahead.

This article, “The future belongs to the young and nimble,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com.