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Having worked in the technology industry for,
I'm showing my age here, twenty plus years
I've been exposed to
the way the large enterprises on a worldwide basis,
you know the Fortune 2000, consume
applications and technology products
from the largest technology vendors, software companies,
SaaS providers, even hardware
and intelligent device manufacturers and
I think it's interesting that this is probably one of the most
broken and dysfunctional supply chains
there is in the world if you look at consumer products,
if you look at manufacturing
all of these supply chains have been optimized and formalized and
completely established over the years
whereas you look at this software supply chain and we still operate in 2013 in a
world where
the manufacturer that the software producer isn't completely clear
what they've sold to their customers and certainly isn't clear on what the
customer is using
and then you translate yourself into the enterprise,
you're the CIO of one of these large Fortune 2000
enterprises and a game quite possibly you don't understand exactly what you've
purchased from your software vendor
and you certainly don't have a good handle
on what you're actually using against what you've purchased
and so I think a huge opportunity for improvement
is just how to provide transparency and clarity
to this overall supply chain and that would include
providing to the producers of the technology
capabilities and solutions that enable them
to understand exactly who are my customers,
what have those customers purchased, how do those purchase rights change over
time and how are my customers actually consuming my products
and then on the flip side provide that same information
ideally through a single repository to the
enterprise to the CIO organization within the enterprise
so that they clearly understand what have I purchased
how am I actually using the products that I've purchased
am I getting true value out of the money I spent with
my software providers and
obviously this is a difficult challenge to resolve or it would have been
accomplished more quickly but I think as
the industry matures
over the next 5-10 years we'll see significant improvements in this area.
The big challenge though for both the producer of the technology and
the enterprise
is that their environments are actually getting more complicated
when you factor in things like virtualization,
consumption of software through the cloud
and mobility, bring your own devices, all of these end users now within the
enterprise
are using iPads, they're using Android devices, they're using iPhones.
The challenge only gets more complex so
will see progress but again progress will be made against a
problem that's getting more and more complicated.