Nodeable Blog

Call it irrational exuberance.  Call it hype.  Call it whatever you want, but understand that just because a big technology trend dominates the media doesn’t mean it’s The Right Thing for you or your company to embrace.  Not wholesale, anyway.

For example, consider just a few of the trends sweeping the industry, particularly those that are finding their way into job specifications.  HTML5, NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB), cloud computing, Hadoop, etc.  Spend a few minutes on TechCrunch and you’ll start to feel that YOU MUST BUY INTO THESE RIGHT NOW!

And, in some cases, you should.

But not always.  If you’re building a cloud application, for example, you’re likely going to want the scale-out capabilities of a NoSQL database like MongoDB.  But Oracle has a good point arguing that you wouldn’t want to build a checking application for a bank with NoSQL technology.   SQL has its place, and NoSQL has its place.  It just happens to be dominant for new school applications, which may not be the kind you’re developing.

Or consider Hadoop, which has dramatically lowered the (economic) bar to data mining/analytics.  Hadoop is fantastic technology, but it’s batch-oriented.  If you need real-time analytics, you’re likely going to want to couple Storm with Hadoop, as we do here at Nodeable.  Or maybe you should embrace Red Hat’s JBoss Data Grid 6, which “as an in-memory, key-value store…is much more optimized to handle the operations that Hadoop simply can’t: transactions like the kind found in e-commerce and financial trading systems.”

Does this mean you dump Hadoop and swap it for Data Grid or Storm?  Of course not.  But it does mean that developers need to look beyond the hype to determine what is the best tool for a particular job.

The same thing holds true in mobile, where HTML5 promised to be the end to mobile’s fragmentation problem.  Instead, it turns out native apps dominate the smartphone space, while content-friendly tablets are much more likely to be friendly to HTML5.

The list goes on.  Some swear by Node.js, but it’s best for server-side app development, and not a panacea, according to Nodeable CEO Dave Rosenberg.  Cloud?  You probably shouldn’t choose private or public, but both, declares Citrix’s Peder Ulander.  Etc. etc.

Each of these technologies is trending because it solves real needs in novel, useful ways.  But this doesn’t mean they’re right for you.  Of course, one of the great things about cloud and open source and other megatrends like these is that they tend to skew open, such that you can try before you buy.  As a vendor, this is a huge boon, as I’d much rather customers buy what they need and are happy, rather than getting duped into buying hype that doesn’t fit their needs.

That’s the old world: buy into the hype and regret is later.  The new world lets you regret your decision right away.

The gods could be crazy, or they simply may not like IT very much.  Over the past decade, trend after trend has arisen to give power back to developers to get their work done, and away from the bureaucratic IT staff that want to manage that work.  IT, however, has the potential to claim a very valuable role in the changing enterprise, but requires a new mindset and mission.

In a new research report (executive summary available for free), Gartner articulates this shift away from IT-as-king to IT-as-facilitator, and how the cloud fosters the trend:

In 2010, organizations were compelled to consume IT services from external cloud providers to achieve their business, budget, and IT goals. But organizations realize that external cloud computing is not a panacea. They still need internal data centers to house critical applications and data. However, the use of external cloud providers has conditioned organizations to expect IT resources — whether internal or external — that are offered in an on-demand, self-service manner. Therefore, IT organizations are forced to offer IT services by using the same consumption model or otherwise risk extinction.

Poor IT.  First it had to deal with the rise of open source, and now cloud.  Both trends have forced IT to loosen its stranglehold on the software, hardware, and services used with the enterprise.  All of the arguments that failed against open source are also failing to stem the tide of cloud computing.

And rightly so.

But none of this means that IT is dead.  It just means, as Gartner points out, that IT’s role needs to change.  For example, DevOps is a very real phenomenon, but I suspect few organizations will have the know-how or brazen courage to take the Netflix route and embrace DevOps completely.  The trick is to give developers more flexibility without imposing on them the burden of setting up and managing all infrastructure themselves.  Yes, some will want precisely this.  But most just want greater influence over the tools they use.

They’re not going to get this from OpenView or any of the legacy tools from legacy vendors.  They’re just not going to blend private and public cloud resources, host their code on GitHub, and be bothered with clunky old management tools.  It’s not going to happen.

So IT needs to redefine its new role.  And it needs to get new tools for doing so.  Or it’s going to evaporate into obsolescence.