It’s an exciting time to be an IT journalist, and I mean that almost completely sincerely. Some big names are doing things which, to use my very best hackneyed American, are way out in left field; in fact they’re not even in the same field.
A lot of this excitement was first generated by web behemoth Google, and its apparently unstoppable, Godzilla-like march into sectors unknown. And into markets where the incumbents used to sit pretty atop large piles of cash smoking fat cigars and watching their profits grow.
First there was search, and on the second day came a price comparison site called Froogle, and then maps, email, instant messaging, blogging tools, Wi-Fi access, photo sharing, word processing, spreadsheets – sorry if I’ve missed anything but I only have 500 words to play with. Most of these services are free, and are now slowly filtering up into the enterprise via what we like to call the consumerisation of IT. This phenomenon, which is no doubt despised by most IT managers, usually involves employees cajoling, threatening or begging IT to let them use all those neat little tools they’re used to at home.
This trend has made IT journalism a lot more interesting by blurring the lines between consumer and corporate markets, and while the roots of this go back a long way, it has really been hotting up in the past couple of years. Gartner even predicts that the majority of new technologies that enterprises adopt between 2007 and 2012 will have roots in consumer apps.
But alongside the consumerisation of enterprise IT has come another trend, the commoditisation of IT, as ostensibly non-IT companies get in on the act.
Reuters was, I assumed, a world-renowned media company, but that’s not the whole picture anymore. It has been producing instant messaging and collaboration tools for the financial industry for a number of months now, under its Reuters Messaging arm, and has its sights on other sectors. According to the firm, it is trying to differentiate itself by offering interoperability with the major public IM clients, and archived conversations and chat rooms, among other things.
And then there’s Tesco – the retailer we all love to hate – which has just launched with much fanfare into the software market. This could turn out to be a monumental mistake, or Tesco will once again confound the critics and extend its dominance in offline and online retailing. What it has shown, however, is that as long as you have the money, the balls and the marketing, the boundaries for technology and non-technology firms can be, erm, boundless.
And IT managers mustn’t seal themselves in a corporate IT bubble, for these trends may yet influence the enterprise information technology landscape of the future.
