Disruptive Computing

This is a new term in management and consulting lingo, I see more and more often. Usually, though not from the traditional technology product vendors. 

Wikiepedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology) says about this: "A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a marketing term describing a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a "disruptive" strategy, rather than a "revolutionary" or "sustaining" strategy, to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market." From my point of view though, disruptive also comes with the changing of Information Technology and how we address IT in businesses. Certainly, there are still many organizations, who are very single vendor driven, but you will find everywhere nowadays people who dig deeper and find that we are living in interesting times. Software as a Services - SaaS
Open Source
Virtualization

While each of them are out of different categories, but all of these technologies are disruptive to the old ways of doing IT. It less about talking, but its about doing it.

What's the biggest thing about WiMax?
WRONG!
The key innovative about a larger teleco provider driver implementation from WiMax would be, that you don't a home or even corporate LAN anymore. Even within data centers - no more LANs. That means also no more servers with firewalls, reverse proxies, intrusion detection, routers, switches. Some readers may think " A security nightmare. " Think again! Are you really sure that your systems are so much better of today? Would it really be a big difference to put - similar to a desktop PC - all the security software on the server itself?

Just a thought, I did not try that! Although, with drive of IT to creating (Virtual Machine driven) appliances rather then traditional server builds, we will probably soon be faced with this environment. 

Why is SaaS disruptive? Easy: Now we don't even have a data center anymore.

Did you see the latest announcement from Zoho? Next to a full office suite, CRM and other on-line tools, they are starting to offer a web based Human Resource HR system. You know about Google Apps, I am sure, and here you have your company email and a few excellent collaboration tools.

Just WiMax or other W-Lan protocols from Desktops and Laptops directly accessing your on-line applications located at the other end of the globe.

This also means, that a new SaaS Application - online Email - could be in the US, in Germany, Thailand, South Africa, China or elsewhere on the planet (did I say on the planet?). It seems we are all about to become lawyers - oh, yes we IT people already are, I forgot.

What would that mean for service providers, for IT, for Support ... Very disruptive isn't it?

Look at Open Source! Free and very often very good software. What does that do to your IT business and the industry.

You can download on of the best available Java (or Ruby, Php) Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) with visual interface editor, drag and drop of web services and so on for free. Its Netbeans. It seriously does increase productivity for your developers and as architects you can use to pre-define the playing field. 
Linux on the Laptop or the Desktop! Take Ubuntu or Kubuntu with all the office tools required. In your businesses you can also decide, which hardware to buy (= no hardware setup issues) and you change. Very disruptive.

What does all this mean for IT?

The theme of low skill "commodity" staff or generalists is over. Or better to say: We are finding out that in all areas of an IT organization one will need strong skills, mixed with generalists in the specific areas may be, to make the right decision of the mix of technology you want to deploy.

Organization who are not doing that, who have 3rd parties making decisions for them will be left out of this new disruptive world and be less competitive. Why? Because the existing wisdom of IT is to monolithic in its approach and not agile at all. New IT allows you to change functionality in your applications within ours and New++ will allow you to have the user do a lot himself.

You will people who are hands on, who understand these new dynamics from a functional and technical point of view, who can loop back into the IT Strategy, to ensure constant transformation of your IT is happening.

Instead of calling these new technology waves disruptive, let's understand this as constant change and constant innovation, which is important to track. It has been enabled by people who believed good software can be open and free (means: Not good service). Even if you don't use open source in your organization, but many innovations the IT team talks about today has been inspired by Open Source and it changed IT from slow motion to fast forward!