Tear up the textbook and go web scale

Jason Dance urges resellers and enterprises to consider the advantages of web-scale technology

The first time someone told me about WhatsApp, I was intrigued as to how a company could afford to allow hundreds of millions of subscribers to send unlimited text messages anywhere for a one-off 99p.

How could Twitter and Facebook use an extensible environment to support billions of real-time updates a day, with all their attendant services? As most of us know now, they use web-scale architecture, which might be said to have rewritten the rules.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) comes up a lot in my conversations with reseller partners, because these guys have also rewritten the rules of economics in much the same way as Facebook and company, but this time for enterprise IT.

If a customer needs a rapidly provisioned IT environment, they can get one spun up instantly for only a few quid from Amazon.

This is considered a threat by the traditional channel because your garden-variety reseller would prefer to sell you a few extra servers and get you up and running with your new on-site, hardware-based offering straight away. Certainly their skill sets are geared to doing that – and their businesses are very much in danger if the demand disappears.

Quite what they'll do when most IT infrastructure is based on highly commoditised no-margin hardware, and every IT function and capability exists as a portable software instance, is anybody's guess.

And so we reach a break point in enterprise IT. Will hosting providers and cloud services companies extend their use of web-scale architectures to undercut everyone else, heralding the dependence of hordes of enterprises on cheap public cloud services?

Or will customers continue to seek control over their assets and reject the opportunities of public cloud services in favour of something tangible, nailed-down and sat in the corner humming away?

The answer is a bit of both. I can't see mid-sized to large enterprises going 100 per cent third party. They're likely to prefer a hybrid offering in the vast majority of cases. The real question is how resellers can change to take advantage of this.

The big opportunity is to enable enterprise customers to harness the same fully virtualised, web-scale cloud architectures that have seen the technology behemoths revolutionise IT services.

By capitalising on these same technology principles, they too can rewrite the economics of their IT infrastructure and move to a hyper-converged, software-defined datacentre platform with extraordinary flexibility and responsiveness to help them foster innovation in their IT department for a distinct competitive advantage.

Jason Dance is managing director of Big Technology