Quantum contemplates rebound
Published: 11 Dec 2003 10:45 GMT
Like Sarbanes-Oxley?
Sarbanes-Oxley. I think data protection is one. Security has been one. Disaster recovery is one. Just updating the old infrastructure. I saw a survey recently that says the infrastructure today is the oldest -- in terms of years since it's been (upgraded) -- since 1986... I think that's where money is being spent.
Contrast that with the consumer business. Consumer IT spending -- to the extent it's IT business -- has actually continued to do quite well. And people are pursuing new applications. They're buying music players, they're buying digital cameras. They're putting Wi-Fi in their home. They're doing that stuff.
In the IT space… nothing has emerged to cause people to do what they traditionally did when IT was very successful -- which is to invest in new, fundamental applications. They don't believe yet.
Do you see a closer relationship between the IT part of the business and the business function itself? You see a lot of these buzzwords like utility computing and adaptive enterprise…
Every IT person worth their salt, for the last 10 years, has always worked very hard to make IT a business imperative. Definitely, spending was loose and free, relative to today, but I don't think that changed that particular goal.
I was talking to somebody recently, and they pushed back on me about this "no new applications." They said, "Well, what about adaptive enterprise?" and all these things. I said, "That's all infrastructure stuff." Whatever it is, it's just about getting an infrastructure that's lower cost -- that's all that it is. There's nothing about delivering any new value or any new applications. It's just doing it cheaper.
Do you think that there's a point at which we will see more innovation on the application side? Yeah, there is a relationship -- kind of both ways -- between the application and the infrastructure. Applications drive the need for infrastructure; and good, reliable, low-cost infrastructure facilitates good applications. It's definitely a necessary progression. Everybody is sitting back, waiting for what the big new application is. I frequently think it's the ones we tried to do before, that didn't work well -- I don't think it's necessarily a bunch of fundamentally new things. I think it's things like Web services and tying the supply chain.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
345 out of 655 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
