The end of ‘Fashion-IT’ – customers will only pay for value and not technology – ANONYMOUS

Can IT be fashionable? It requires a huge imagination to think that it is. Surely? But has it been in the past? And if so has it had its day with the cloud moving in.

The general definition of fashion is “is a general term for a popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person”.  In computing terms, it has been fashionable to adopt solutions and services that have been widely adopted. Virtualization for example, is a widely considered as the ‘fashion’ for server consolidation and data center optimization. Cloud computing is another fashion.

Now this quote is anonymous so cannot be attributable but I sort of like it. Customers of course only want value. And no they dont want technology per se. Mobile phones are exceptionally fashionable with micro features, colours and interfaces that are aimed at very transient customer base. But mainstream corporations do not want bells and whistles. Nor colours. Nor variety. They want reliability, performance, security and functionality. Cliches but true. Look at vendors. Trawl the press and attend the shows and you will still see an endless road of why this is better than that. Of course vendors dont have a choice really. Its not in their interest to join a debate about the end of ‘Fashion-IT’.

Summarising all this up it makes it all the more possible that in the minds of most corporate IT and business people is the belief that business case propositions for anything other than good honest value based investment will get binned. Sure the CXO may have a fashionable mobile phone for personal use, but there is a good chance that the CXO will advocate strick controls for end point management and data security, regardless of whether staff can have their own devices at work.

But what really intrigues me is the view that virtualization as Fashion-IT is moving away from the on premise datacenter. I see more and more public and private cloud offerings from a growing army of providers who have cracked the economic models and service levels, that now make a very compelling alternative for a data center refresh discussion. CXO people are wise now to the true value from doing this stuff themselves and have as evidence the long list of failed projects, rising training costs to keep exams maintained, drops in customer satisfaction results and more. They look at the alternatives and see that even if they have to ‘compromise slightly’ on a feature by moving to a cloud service they will consider this as good value for money.

My advice? For people looking always internally at their own people and refresh cycles, I would just keep one eye on the mirror. Fashion is a fickle aspect of our lives today.

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