To paraphrase, the two ends of the spectrum for all things are scarcity and abundance.  When things are scarce, in economic terms (supply and demand), value increases.  When they are abundant, value decreases.  Makes sense, right?

When things go awry, in our business at least, is often when those forces change – but we humans don’t.

As commercial IT developed as an industry, it did so based upon scarcity factors that are now completely abundant. But our industry is addicted to the economics of the past – fighting tooth and nail to maintain control (and $$$), which it is inevitably going to lose.

When CPU power was scarce and demand for it increasing, the value (both economic and usage wise) increased.  Companies – in fact, entire industries – built their business models on this “fact.”  The “power” of the processor was the deterministic baseline for not only the cost of the processor, but the cost of the system surrounding that processor.  The engineering involved in the processor itself, and all the “systemic” components surrounding it, was huge, proprietary, and expensive – because it could be.  CPU power was the scarcity metric that mattered.  Application vendors who write code charged based on the same CPU metric.  Many still do.

When is the last time CPU (MIPS, BIPS, TIPS, etc.) power was scarce?  A long time ago.  The basis of “Systems” economics are fundamentally flawed in the modern era.

The same holds true for all other technology areas.  Storage scarcity metrics have always been capacity related, networking metrics have been bandwidth related – or port density related. When is the last time you had trouble with either of those?  You can buy capacity or bandwidth for effectively nothing.  But if you’ve always made your living fetching big money for your stuff that was originally designed and developed for a scarcity metric that is now abundant, you have a problem.  You might not like it, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t go out of business if you don’t adapt to current realities.  How’s the newspaper business these days?  Content was scarce, and conduits to it even scarcer.  Hello internet, bye bye business model.

Scarcity used to be about the bits, but today it’s not.  Today, scarcity in IT is about time and money. That’s why we now live in an Op-Ex world and not a Cap-Ex one.  That’s why the mid-market – the SMB – is going change the way the rest of the world operates.

The IT market evolved in such a way that the “elite” buyers of stuff – the ones who could afford to sustain the industry at the high end – dictated the rules.  The mass market evolved much more slowly, and only after the industry “dumbed” down the same basic architectural products and made them cheaper to acquire.  Scarcity in the mid-market has almost always been more about “skill” and “cash” than anything else.  If you are the big buyer with the big bucks, you have much less of an issue of skill acquisition – so you fundamentally have different problems you are solving versus the “real world.”

So now commercial IT is loaded to the gills with stuff designed originally at an entirely different time when there were entirely different issues of scarcity, and that will change.

Because of the advancements of technology, CPU power, capacity, bandwidth (the things that our entire $100B+ annual spend is based on) – all things once scarce – are now abundant in IT.  I have a 34 person company.  Guess what we run?

We run it ourselves – although I HATE being in the IT business (and yes, I see the irony).  We run VMware.  We run Backup (CommVault).  We run iSCSI and NAS (Dell and NetApp).  We run HP dual-socket Quad-core Intel Xeon processors.  We do all the same stuff everyone else does – just on a smaller scale.

I have zero desire, no offense, to have to pay people to keep this stuff working.  It adds no value to my business.  I am forced to be in the IT business.  I would much rather spend the money focusing on adding value versus sucking value.  I will be 100% in the cloud – as soon as it’s realistic for me to be.  I will focus on the real scarcity issues of TIME and MONEY.  I will let others run infrastructure, as it is not core to my existence.  I will focus on Op-Ex, and ultimately eliminate the Cap-Ex considerations altogether.

However, in the meantime, I don’t want my folks spending one second of time they could be spending adding value sucked up instead dealing with low-value abundance issues.  When we need to increase capacity, I don’t want them to have to “learn” about that capacity just to use it.  There is no value in “learning” about something that is effectively free.  How much is a 2 TB disk drive now?  $200?  How much time should be spent on a decision of such economic irrelevance?  None.

As long as we’re going to run IT ourselves, we need to focus on the real scarcity metrics, and capacity/cost ain’t one of them any longer.  The decision time should be determining what is the easiest, best way to add capacity while DECREASING the scarcity effect of what does matter.  How should I add capacity in such a way that decreases the amount of time I need to spend managing it, tuning it, praying to it, etc. – and that lowers my Op-Ex.

This is why the cloud will ultimately rule the way we consume IT.  I say ultimately, because things take time, old habits die violently, there are still many things that need to be fixed,  and so on – but it will happen.

So along the way, our industry has to learn to start making things stupid.  Make it brain dead simple. Stop thinking that complexity equates to value or competitive advantage – it doesn’t.  I have two examples: Apple and Drobo.  My iPhone is a stunningly complex hunk of technology, that just works.  The “phone” is not a scarcity,  nor are its functions.  I paid a lot for it because it is so simple.  I use it for a ton more than just a phone, because of the higher-level value it enables.  It was not long ago when capacity, bandwidth, and technology were very scarce in telephony – but not any more.  The value proposition has shifted to EASY and COOL.  Remember when you could only store limited voice mails for limited amounts of time?  Why?  Because capacity USED to be scarce.  Not anymore.  Charge me now and I’ll dump you in a nano-second.  Remember when you were billed on TIME?  Why? Because of limited capacity the amount of time you spent using the asset was valuable to all concerned.  Not anymore. My MacBook is similar, I don’t even know what I’m doing with it yet but I know this – it just works.  I don’t load drivers, but it prints.  It bought me time.

When my guys asked me for my thoughts on capacity, I thought about my home.  I have a Drobo (and a bunch of other loose drives all over the place).  If I need more capacity, I add a drive.  I don’t care if it’s the same size or current generation – it just works.  I don’t need to “administer” anything.  I don’t set up RAID, it figures it out.  I rip out one drive, plop in a bigger one, and it just grows itself and reconfigures itself such that it’s optimized and protected.  I have no idea how.  I couldn’t care less.  It just works.  I use a USB version, but they support iSCSI, so why not?  If I can use it, it is simple.  It’s stupid.  It has to be!

Stupid is the new smart.