Daily Network Monitor

Well, it’s not all as earth-shaking as that, but I’m getting tired of grabby headlines that loudly announce or predict the death of this or that.  Starting with disco, hardly anything is as dead as people like to say.  Cultural trends and technologies alike are much more prone to mutate and evolve or get reborn or remixed than to actually die. (Has anybody else noticed that the Apple Newton didn’t quite die, but got reborn first as the Palm Pilot and then the iPod Touch, and you can bet next week’s MacWorld will give birth to more…)

So you can understand my mixed feelings at Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s well-reasoned but poorly-headlined piece in Network World, The IT department is dead, author argues, which reviews Nicholas Carr’s book of the moment, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.  You may remember Carr for asking Does IT Matter? in his 2004 book of the same title.

IT isn’t dead, IT departments are not dead, and IT professionals are not dead.  Far from it.  In fact, I think they’re all feeling much better and might even get up and go for a walk.

Now, that said, this certainly doesn’t mean that IT departments are going to be able to sit around and do what they’ve always done for years and get away with it.  They will adapt or they will in fact die.  To borrow one of Carr’s analogies, just because few if any businesses today generate their own power on-site does’t mean that there’s no market for power or people skilled in generating it.  Those professionals just had to make some adjustments in their skills and career paths.

What Carr and many others - notably Google - are getting at is that lots of parts of IT are getting commodified (that means made into a commodity, not thrown in the commode), getting turned into utilities and getting outsourced or shared.  The role of a small or mid-sized business IT pro is going to evolve in two ways because of this:

1. In-house IT will have to get skilled at managing the IT utilites: they will have to select, monitor and integrate rather than provide these kinds of services themselves

2. In-house IT will become more and more concerned with applications and business results and less concerned with infrastructure and connectivity

I think you’ll agree that neither trend will do much to reduce the demand for in-house IT.  Web-based software sold on the ASP model hasn’t put IT managers out on the street, it’s just given them new and even more interesting and valuable responsibilities.  If that’s dead, then I’ve got a deathwish, for sure.

This item via the MSP Mentor blog points out yet another way for smart VARs to get out of commodity selling and deliver sustainable service revenues by specializing.

Heyer’s new Advanced Remote Management Services (ARMS) provides customers with proactive remote monitoring and maintenance of Heyer [ventilation, anesthesia and inhalation] equipment — while complying with network security and regulatory practices … Heyer ARMS leverages the ComBrio Virtual Service Infrastructure (VSI), a virtual, secure IP infrastructure used for the continuous transport of real-time remote device monitoring data and on-demand access for remote device management.

Talk about a life-or-death SLA.  I’d be a little worried leaving my ventilation up to the average VAR, but I’m pretty sure that the ones who figure out how to do this well will be very well off indeed.  I’d even go so far as to predict some kind of IP revolution with all kinds of equipment getting network attached and coming under remote network monitoring.  What a wonderful world that would be.

As Americans, we rarely live without the goods and services we desire. For years, we have heard experts like Alan Greenspan warn that when countries outside of the United States see rapid growing living standards; their currencies will appreciate against ours in parallel. For those of you who are Warren Buffet fans, he was right again. In 2002, Buffet began to purchase foreign currencies, betting on their appreciation versus the dollar. Even a wealthy country like the United States will eventually run out of steam after its citizens spend excessive dollars on foreign produced goods.

Further, once countries like China acquire dollars though the $700 billion US trade deficit, they will begin to dump the dollars once they suspect its valuation is in jeopardy. A country like China, which holds over $1 trillion dollars, has great power in the interconnected global economy, if it begins dumping dollars in favor of Euros thus pushing the dollar to lower levels.

For lots of software companies, the weakening dollar and weakening economy will lead to headaches in meeting growth and profitability objectives. Ironically, these companies tend to be US market centric with a bias or mis-understanding of what being a global company means. In contrast, international software companies find unseen benefits in dark clouds and the current economic status is a perfect example. Global markets offer growth, risk mitigation and excitement but you need to choose wisely. For example, it is unlikely a market like Australia with a population of 20 million people will balance a slowed US economy entirely but it is probable that a select list markets will offer opportunity to supplement the decline in US markets.

Further, being global does not mean you need local representation in every country though that decision is highly dependent on product characteristics like price, complexity and training to name a few. For those that build easy to use products like WhatsUp Gold, the internet and the ecommerce business process offer great opportunity for revenue and profitability enhancements.