An Arab Spring For IT

Editor’s note: Alan S. Cohen is Vice President of Marketing at Nicira. A 20-year IT veteran, Alan has held executive positions at Cisco, Airespace, Tahoe Networks, IBM, US WEST, Coopers & Lybrand, and the Department of Energy.

The innovation world are witnessing a transformation

Those of us in the innovation world are witnessing a transformation: A buyer-led revolution in how information research is both produced and consumed. Smartphones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional "workforce productivity" and communications applications.

Said simply, for the first time in a generation, information innovation's supply chain is in the state of serious disruption. It in fact is an "Arab Spring" for the IT world and when it's over, there will be a host of new companies driving enterprise innovation. Don't believe me? Let's establish some historical context.

Most revolutions take time. There are always early revolutionaries who pave the way for the change in the system. Though we chart the Arab Spring to events in Tunisia just over a year ago, the underlying currents driving change in the Middle East are decades in the making. In our industry, the antecedents are as well more than a decade old. VMware, the early power player in compute virtualization, was founded in 1998. Salesforce, the first big SaaS player, was founded in 1999. The iPod, the progenitor of the contemporary smartphone, was revealed openly in 2001.

The center of these revolutions

At the center of these revolutions and disruptions, you will find end users who have a simple mantra: "We want what we want, when we want it, to get our jobs done." Employers have to meet these goals. But their job can be doubly difficult: Companies and organizations are frequently locked into existing IT approaches and are now told to do more with less. Business leaders around the world are demanding that the current model of IT, one that has led to a multi-trillion dollar per year industry, become more responsive to their twin goals of business velocity and efficiency.

But today, in the beginning of what historians will someday call the “as-a-service” era of research, there is a new mantra for Enterprise IT: Faster, cheaper, and pay only for what you use.

Think about it: Less than five years ago, people were questioning whether the iPhone was ready for the enterprise. In 2012, Apple is expected to sell $19 billion worth of iPhones and iPads to the enterprise, making iot the 25th largest IT vendor in the world. How’s that for a shadow IT movement?

The usual modus operandi for many IT superpowers

Embracing rapid change is not the usual modus operandi for many IT superpowers. The need for top and bottom line growth, and the scrutiny of public markets, does not make changing your business model on-the-fly the easiest task. If you are a multi-billion dollar IT player, how do you explain to your installed base, "Guess what, everything is going to change?"

Nicira Networks is accelerating the transformation to cloud infrastructure by delivering software that virtualizes the network and enables elastic, scale-out data centers.The company was founded by networking technology leaders from Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley, and is led by proven entrepreneurs in networking, security and virtualization.