Who’s On Phirst

I just read a blog by Aziz Gilani about “Enterprise 2.0” and his take on how enterprises will respond to the web 2.0 technologies and it’s new approaches. I think it was quite insightful and I agree with him when he comments on some of the basic assumptions by Forrester Group. Aziz writes "Having spent the past 8 years either working with CIOs or within the enterprise I can honestly say that no company will come out and say something along the lines of 'I really need some Web 2.0 in here. Where is my checkbook?' They are more likely to unwittingly stumble into Web 2.0 technology based on improvements to their end to end processes". He is dead on. Web 2.0 is not a defined category like CRM or ERP was and there isn’t one monolithic vendor pushing the concept. It is a bottom-up trend with hundreds of vendors (including free open source tools) that are making it all possible.

He also goes on to mention that configuration of the ever-expanding list of applications will continue to be a huge challenge. Again, dead on. We here at Phurnace see that every day as we talk to customers and prospects. The IT ops and software development tools today talk about “configuration and deployments”, but more often than not, they state “place current deployment process here”. That is the PROBLEM. The current process used by Global 2000 companies is error-prone, cumbersome and often laden with scripts that are fragile or in constant need of attention.

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are here indeed, but don’t lose sight of the plumbing. Deployment and configuration management should remain top of mind. Because aren’t we sort of at “Infrastructure 4.0” and it still isn’t simple?

-Larry Warnock