Published on the 10/06/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Technology analyst IDC Australia has forecast a “mass extinction event” among technology vendors which fail to transition their business models to cope with what it terms the “third platform”…
Casting mainframes as the first computing era, and client-server/PCs as the second era, IDC Australia says that the emerging “third platform”, which brings together mobile, cloud, social, big data and the internet of things, will prompt significant upheaval among computer vendors in what it terms a “period of creative destruction”.
According to the report, authored by Graham Barr, director of telecommunications at IDC Australia; “the transition to the third platform will create another mass IT extinction event that will first sidestep then wipe out many of the suppliers of today’s second platform technologies and services.”
While the report claims that only 22 percent of IT revenues currently come from sales of what it terms third platform technologies, it forecasts that will rise to 50 percent by 2020.
Suaad Sait, executive vice president of products and markets at SolarWinds, which commissioned the report, said “We don’t consider ourselves a dinosaur” adding that the IT management software that the company developed could be as relevant to companies deploying third platform as second platform systems.
He said that SolarWinds had not been surprised by the thematic findings of the report, although Sait did question whether software-defined networking would take off as quickly as IDC Australia suggested.
Where he was in furious agreement with IDC was over the need for a change to the IT skills mix as the third platform takes hold.
Sait said that SolarWinds was an example itself of a business which ran its operations “off a bunch of as- a-service solutions”. The role of the IT team was to make sure everything worked and to integrate applications operating in the cloud.
According to IDC’s Graham Barr: “CIOs must evolve to become a mix of enterprise architect, IT consultant and in-house provider of the dull-but-important ‘back-end’ technology. However, increasingly the critical decisions on these new, customer-oriented ‘front-end’ technologies are being taken by line-of-business executives from outside the IT department. The CIO becomes something of an IT broker, selecting best of breed/available solutions for any given task, either on-premise or off-premise (hosted, cloud, etc). And clearly even if off-premise, the CIO will need the tools and strategy to police these third platform technologies to ensure they really deliver the outcomes planned and the value projected.
“By 2018, adoption of third platform technologies will change or re-define 90 percent of IT roles. IT talent management will be a major factor in realising the full business potential of the third platform – roles most significantly impacted will include application development, service and IT management. Emerging roles today, such as mobile development and social developers, will be catapulted onto centre stage. “
