by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson recently commented on the formidable predictions of Jonathan Eunice, Principal IT Advisor at Illuminati: “His argument is this: Technology vendors used to be vertical players. If you wanted technology, you went to one shop – say, IBM or DEC – and bought everything. Then it went horizontal, with Microsoft selling an OS, Cisco selling routers, Oracle selling databases and so forth… Oracle recently announced it will stop developing for the Intel Itanium chip platform, which is now owned by HP. Eunice believes this is the first volley in a power grab among the tech titans, all of whom now want to own the tech stack. The result will swing the tech sector back toward a vertical market, he argues, with very bad results for integration support between their offerings.”
Eunice is quoted as saying, “The vendors are simply too large, too powerful, too few, and too ambitious for relationships and cross-support agreements to not break down. This is extremely troubling for customers. Cooperation and comity are the linchpins of a horizontally integrated industry. Without them, all the assumptions enterprises have made about ‘this stuff will work together’ and ‘the investments we make in your joint solutions will continue to be relevant, updated, and supported in the years to come’–all those assumptions become faulty and dangerous.”
Lawson comments, “Now that’s the sort of integration nightmare that could make an IT leader feel as though the world can’t end soon enough… The short press release doesn’t discuss whether these changes will extend to the companies selling operational technology, so my guess is that it’s not an issue of niche operational companies being bought out by tech vendors thus far. Still, it’s an important convergence and one that the smart CIO will notice.”
