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Compute Costs are cut in half; every 18 months, Fiber costs are dropping, storage costs are dropping, but why is IT still expensive?
500 Billion dollars are wasted a year in IT. How? Around half of all IT projects fail, and over half of commercial software features are not used.
Jim Whitehurst, The CEO of RedHat presented an interesting vision during the Interop NYC Keynote. First off he did not spend time discussing RedHat products, but focused on his macro view of the IT Industry. It went something like this:
IT Vendor Feature Lists + Buggy Software = Vendor/Customer Tension and Failed Projects
He has a unique viewpoint as he presided over Delta airlines during their bankruptcy process. He was able to squeeze dollars out of catering contracts and every area of the company, except IT. IT was locked into multi-year contracts they didn’t need and was dealing with buggy software and failed projects.
He stated that commercial software quality (defects per 1,000 lines of code) has not improved over the last 30 years. However Open Source quality is much higher than commercial quality and continues to improve. He categorized Open Source on the level with the Kaizen revolution in manufacturing.
His view of the future includes Open Source (of course) but also Public Cloud Computing. RedHat is one of the building blocks behind many clouds (Salesforce.com for one) but they are also adding functionality to make it easier for the end customer to leverage the public cloud. They are adding a layer that will abstract cloud differences and make it easier to pull in elements of various public clouds with a common Cloud API.
His prediction is that today an Enterprise developer spends 2/3 of their time “Trying to figure out how to do something” and not delivering business value. He estimates that a common Cloud API will make them 3x more productive.
