Meeting demand in the on-demand era

Everything is in place, the ducks are lining up nicely.

We have the great generational change from humans raised in an analog world and artificially inseminated with a digital gene to real live humans naturally born and bred into the digital age.

Out of this comes an entirely new approach to how these digital beings analyze their surroundings, solve problems, and conduct business.

And finally, we have the technology, both in terms of major shifts like Web 2.0 but also in the nuts and bolts like IBMs first server product line designed to work the way Web 2.0 works, moving in to place to support it all.

I spoke with Steve Papermaster, CEO of NGenera, formerly BSG Alliance — a name change that might speak volumes about the changes sweeping across the global business landscape, thanks in some measure to powerful demographic forces Papermaster sees at work in the marketplace.

Anyone with two eyes in their head can see that today’s young people work differently than most of us old analogers. They have 32 things going on simultaneously. They are texting their friends, perusing songs on their iPods, surfing Facebook, posting Twitter entries — all while doing their homework.

In the U.S. alone, there are 80 million people like this. They are between the ages of 13 and their late 20s, many of whom are just now entering the workforce.

“This is the echo from the baby boom generation,” says Papermaster.

This digital generation — always connected, highly collaborative — will transform social networking into a way of doing business.

And here we have a second force at work: “consumerization” as a major technology driver for the enterprise. A nod to those who first identified this trend as one that will increasingly set the business agenda.

Every demand is on demand

Consider eBay. The company lays out a nine-month strategy to enter the Asian market. From an operational standpoint, the plan must include the ability to support millions of new buyers and sellers. The problem is, consumers in this market have already “self-selected” eBay — pushing the business plan forward from outside the company because of the fast-paced and growing World Wide Web.

According to NGenera, these forces are leading toward a far less hierarchical structure to business organizations and one that values peer collaboration; a business climate that may be more inclined to sharing rather than in protecting IP; a movement from a plan-and-push-out mentality to one that emphasizes engagement and co-innovation.

In the old days, business centered around transactions and ERP. Even if you were a multinational company, you rolled out a marketing strategy slowly, across borders, which reflected local markets and pricing.

Today you can’t wait weeks or months to find out results. You can’t implement a marketing strategy that takes months to roll out across the globe. You can’t have lags built into pricing changes because of the rapid nature of currency fluctuations.

Commodities used to be more stable, like fuel prices. Now they change in a nanosecond. Everything is on demand.

“Think globally, act locally” might have been your mantra but not today.

More than half of Cisco’s revenue, for example, comes from outside the U.S. Companies like Cisco need to operate with a near simultaneous execution of their strategy worldwide, notes Papermaster.

Several years ago, I wrote a story on UPS rolling out its Wi-Fi infrastructure across all of its facilities. I checked back two years later, and they were still rolling it out.

Today, says Papermaster, they would have hired a company much like a city does to roll out its wireless infrastructure. They would have built in incentives for finishing the project early and would have allowed the company to participate in the savings achieved.

“It could be done in six months,” Papermaster estimates.

Supporting the on-demand business agenda

On-demand technology and thinking also means that your strategy must be flexible. Everything is in continuous mode, just like those tech-savvy digital kids you see every day doing 10 things at once.

IBM, a company that always surprises me because it, like the market, never stays still, is making a play for the infrastructure of those competing for business in this way.

Last week the company introduced iDataPlex, a new server product line designed for Web 2.0 datacenters that will process streaming video, online gaming, social networks, and other spikes in traffic.

It doubles the number of systems that can run in a single rack and uses 40 percent less energy in delivering five times the computing power.

The iDataPlex runs at room temperature, uses standard components, and according to Charles King, principal at Pund-IT, “It can connect with other machines in a cloud and process portions of enormous applications in parallel.”

The point is, according to King, next-generation IT solutions are expanding computer density and power consumption with it by 10 times.

King called the iDataPlex “a highly familiar yet essentially new approach to provisioning Internet-scale datacenters,” making it worthy of considerations for emerging Web 2.0 solutions.

King says IBM “has reset the bar” for what customers want from a Web 2.0 datacenter and what they expect IT vendors to deliver.

And like IBM, the bar has been reset for everyone who has something to sell, be it a product or a service.

It is not a question of whether the old ways were better or worse. That’s looking backwards. The old ways are dead, like it or not. From this new generation of producers and consumers we will see the emergence of a new way of living.

Get used to it.