1054RA The Emerging Master IT Architecture – Client / Server Gives Way to CMSA
Authors: Bill McNee and Mike West
Last week, Saugatuck attended the Wells Fargo Tech Summit in San Francisco, moderating a panel and meeting with a number of industry leaders. This was the second year that we participated in the conference – which we greatly value as another important window into the dynamics shaping the market for business computing products and services – in this case a Wall Street perspective.
Day 1 of the event was filled with an all-star cast of industry leaders. I especially valued John Chambers (CEO, Cisco) opening keynote, as well as the Consumerization of IT panel, Jason Maynard’s (Wells Fargo’s lead software analyst) fireside chat with Safra Catz (CFO, Oracle) – as well as the panel that I moderated on the Future of IT (with senior executives from Snaplogic, ServiceMesh, Deloitte and Nodeable). One of the highlights of the morning session was a short presentation by Biri Singh (Head of Cloud Services, HP), where he outlined at a high level HPs new holistic Cloud strategy that was subsequently announced this past Tuesday (see Saugatuck’s initial take in our Lens 360 blog post HP Cloud Update: Solid Strategy and a Top-down Mandate, 09Apr2012).
But I especially valued a presentation by Malcolm Frank (EVP & Head of Marketing and Strategy, Cognizant Technology Solutions, NASDAQ: CTSH) – who shared his scenario around the key forces helping to shape the future of work (i.e., globalization, the rise of millennials, and the impact of new technologies on both the way we work and how they are helping to transform business processes).
Frank’s thesis is that a new Master IT Architecture is emerging, as mainstream corporate IT now shifts from the client/server stack to a new “Cloud / Mobility / Social / Analytics” stack – or what Frank shorthanded as “So-Mo.” In his view, all four technologies will be central to this new master architecture through 2020. He went on to share that many portions of current business (and IT) models in use are rendered obsolete in this new environment, with “massive potential for value creation at the intersection of business process and the new technology stack.” Malcolm suggested in particular that just as “Industrial BPR + Client / Server” provided massive productivity gains 1990-2010, the combination of “Knowledge BPR + Social Computing” will likewise provide similar productivity gains 2010-2020.