The changing landscape of high-tech startups, what it means for the future of technology.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins points out, “When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it” Technology, he goes on to point out, is not the reason for the success of great companies, but rather a critical component of their strategy. Technology is a means to an end, but for those outside the tech world, it is simply one tool to be exploited.

There is no doubt that the landscape is changing for technology, especially technology startups. In 2015, and indeed for several years prior, we have seen insane valuations of companies that had yet to produce an actual product. To make matters worse, those that do produce a product, produce something which is very impressive, but mostly just a little better than the competition. Usually it is a new way of compressing data, a new de-duplication algorithm, or a way to do analytics on the data at rest. All very cool, and every one thinking they are going to be the next big thing. There is an old saying which goes something like build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, or something like that. The problem is that everyone is building a slightly better mousetrap with slightly different features when what we need is just a basic mousetrap. This is true of storage, hyper-converged, and every other technology startup in the past few years.

Generally speaking we can say that history repeats itself, especially in the high tech world. I was preparing to leave the military during the dot com bubble, just as it burst, I made the last minute decision to stay in and give myself more time to prepare. While this may not exactly be a bubble, we are trending toward a massive consolidation of these high tech startups. The reason is simple, we are overcomplicating everything. Businesses, much like consumers, don’t want complicated flashy technology, they want technology to accelerate what they are doing, they want to augment and improve their lives with technology. In the Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, Douglas Adams makes the point,”We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” The future of technology is not one off complex cool solutions, it is abstraction, simplicity, and integration. If your product doesn’t simplify business or consumers lives, it is likely to be short lived.

The changing landscape of high-tech startups, what it means for the future of technology.

Enterprise Architecture – When is good enough, good enough?

In a conversation with a large customer recently we were discussions their enterprise architecture.  A new CIO had come in and wants to move them to a converged infrastructure.  I digging into what their environment was going to look like as they migrated, and why they wanted to make that move.  It came down to a good enough design versus maximizing hardware efficiency.  Rather than trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the systems, they were looking at how could they deploy a standard, and get a high degree of efficiency but the focus was more on time to market with new features.

My first foray into enterprise architecture was early in my career at a casino.  I moved from a DBA role to a storage engineer position vacated by my new manager.  I spend most of my time designing for performance to resolve poorly coded applications.  As applications improved, I started to push application teams and vendors to fix the code on their side.  As I started to work on the virtualization infrastructure design for this and other companies, I took pride in driving CPU and memory as hard as I could.  Getting as close to maxing out the systems while providing enough overhead for failover.  We kept putting more and more virtual systems into fewer and fewer servers.  In hindsight we spent far more time designing, deploying, and managing our individual snowflake hosts and guests that what we were saving in capital costs.  We were masters of “straining the gnat to swallow the camel”.

Good enterprise design should always take advantage of new technologies.  Enterprise architects must be looking at roadmaps to prevent obsolescence.  With the increased rate of change, just think about unikernel vs containers vs virtual machines, we are moving faster than our hardware refresh cycles on all of our infrastructure.

This doesn’t mean that converged or hyper-converged infrastructure is better or worse, it is an option, but one that is restrictive since the vendor must certify your chosen hypervisor, management software, automation software, etc. with each part of the system they put together.  On the other hand, building your own requires you do that.
The best solution is going to come with compromises.  We cannot continue to look at virtual machines or services per physical host.  Time to market for new or updated features are the new infrastructure metric.  The application teams ability to deploy packaged or developed software is what matters.  For those of us who grew up as infrastructure engineers and architects, we need to change our thinking, change our focus, and continue to add value by being partners to our development and application admin brethren.  That is how we truly add business value.

Enterprise Architecture – When is good enough, good enough?