Brace up for unknown competition

Narsimha Rao Mannepalli

INDIA: If I look back at the way companies and their competition were classified at the start of my career vis-à-vis what I see now, the difference is like night and day. For example, car sales or car rental companies, as well as incumbent full-time taxi drivers would have possibly never considered a software technology company in San Francisco to be their biggest threat.

Yet, here we have Uber who’ve revolutionized and are leading the experience of car-based commute. Similar stories can be seen across the board. Advertisement companies probably never figured Google, a software company, to change the face of advertising. The same holds for numerous retailers who had to stand by and watch companies like Amazon and Alibaba conquer the retail and logistics space.

What’s common to all these companies? Besides the fact that none of these companies are ‘known competitors’ of the companies they’ve displaced, all of these companies have mastered the art of using technology, namely the power of software to charge ahead.

Narsimha Rao, Infosys

Traditional enterprises recognize the fact that they’ve accumulated a legacy of disparate, non-interoperating, generations of technologies that operate in silos. They look at the notable technology budget which is spent largely on human resources and just enough to keep the lights on and are not pleased. Looking at examples like the GAFTA (Google-Apple-Facebook-Twitter-Amazon) group who’ve really tamed the power of software.

These new-age companies have found a way to abstract and codify the complexity of their IT landscape by using the power of software to build highly scalable and highly automated solutions to not just keep the lights on, but to grow and thrive. And this is the inspiration for everyone to renew their IT landscape to continue to remain competitive and relevant.

Clearly, enterprises looking to emulate this kind of high-performance and success need to understand that ‘software is the new hardware’. Software is being used to reimagine, redefine and rewrite the way their current infrastructure operates. Hyper-converged infrastructure, software-defined everything, Open Compute, and a good mix of public, private and hybrid clouds – the possibilities of software are there everywhere.

In a world where digital, big data, IoT are creating new opportunities for enterprises to build new revenue streams in a matter of days, reach out to more customers, significantly improve the overall experience, the importance of having IT infrastructure that can keep pace with all of this cannot be emphasized more. Without a strong foundation that works like greased lightning, companies will never be able to realize the true potential of their IT investments.

So who should these companies looking to ‘lead the pack’ working with? It is best leverage partners who have firmly based their strategies and their businesses on the fact that ‘software is the new hardware’. Not just by talking about it but actually making it a way of life of using software to help their clients ‘run’ operations, ‘build next-gen infrastructure, ‘modernize/migrate’ workloads, and ‘secure’ them against the new threats.

These aren’t hypothetical examples, but can be seen and experienced in daily life whenever you log into Facebook, buy something from Amazon or take a ride in an Uber taxi. With software, the power to reimagine is infinite.

(Narsimha Rao Mannepalli is SVP and Head - Infosys Validation Solutions & Cloud, Infrastructure and Security, Infosys. Views expressed here are of the author and CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse them.)