ZDnet had a story recently titled: Cloud computing: 10 ways it will change by 2020. In the article, one of the people they talked with was John Manley - director of HP's Automated Infrastructure Lab (and someone who I’ve actually had lunch with a few times). One of the statements John made was:

"Cloud computing is the final means by which computing becomes invisible,”

One of the goals of platform as a service is to abstract the software away from the underlying hardware and OS – including what we think of as IaaS today. We’ve only seen the early stumbles of these efforts, but with cloud standards developing over the next few years this 2020 vision should be possible.

IT organizations spend time wringing their hands over issues that will shift - those constraints that are worried about today will no longer be on the critical path tomorrow.  I am sure there will be a whole new set of constraints to take their place though. I used to tell people that hardware without software is just a commodity, but software without hardware is using your imagination. Maybe this will change to “software without a platform…” is just using your imagination.

2020 is less than a decade away, fortunately there will be a new crop of technical and business leaders who will have a natural understanding of this new view of the world. The business pressures of today and the innovations being worked upon  will push us all to make this happen.

HP announced today that  HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) are exiting public beta and in general availability (GA). 

They are backing the GA offerings with an industry-leading service level agreement (SLA) of “3 ½ 9s” (at least 99.95% monthly uptime).  

Anyone talking this year about sensing and autonomous vehicles need to give the nod to Curiosity and its landing on Mars later this month.

William Shatner and Will Wheaton both narrated a video about the Curiosity landing. William Shatner’s is shown below:

The same techniques used to sense the environment used by the lander are entering businesses today (if they haven’t already) as well as the data compression and analysis techniques. Pressure to address conflicts is one of the driving factors for greater innovation. The weight and harsh environments of space exploration have been pushing the limits of engineering and design for decades, and the businesses of today reap the benefits of the innovations generated.

Silicon Angle had a post titled: Top IT “Transformation” Problems and How to Fix Them, describing some of the big issues organizations are facing today. The transformation elements are the typical list of cloud, big data… Another post at Silicon Angle was the Budget Squeeze which went into more details about the constraints that most organizations are under.

I was a bit surprised the post mentioning mobility (or the closely related BYOD). For those that are really active in addressing cloud issues, mobile and cloud are starting to merge together as two dimensions of a computing abundance strategy. It is a case of being pulled in many directions at the same time as having many of these issues coalesce into a common set of opportunities.

We have all these new capabilities that are coming in at lower costs than ever before which you would think would alleviate some of the budget issue, but organizations keep finding new ways to use these abilities (and use more of them) to add value and consume the abundance of resources and possibilities.

This means that the organization’s skills defining business value and justifying investment will be in higher demand than ever before. It is critical for the CIO to have a vision and convey that dream to others.

The more I think about the CIO’s “technical” role, the more emphasis there is on transformation and integration.

McKinsey had an interesting article last year called The Second Economy. It talks about the shift to having computers handle the normal situations in business going forward:

“Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential—it’s almost something we take for granted.”

Much of this is caused by the fact that the attention of people is becoming more scarce as mobility and social techniques increase.

An example of this that we’ve probably all experienced is checking into a flight at the airport.

“These large and fairly complicated conversations that you’ve triggered occur entirely among things remotely talking to other things: servers, switches, routers, and other Internet and telecommunications devices, updating and shuttling information back and forth. All of this occurs in the few seconds it takes to get your boarding pass back.”

When a human does get involved in the transaction, it is a case of human augmented automation, where the people supplement the automated system handling the anomalies. What does this mean for the roles and skills future generations will require?

The McKinsey article then goes on to call this system a second (digital) economy.

As a business leader reads the article, they can think about the investments they have underway and decide if they are supporting the problems of yesterday or preparing for the future. Keynes wrote an article titled: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, that has held up very well. There are many parallels to what architects need to deal with today.

Technologists and business leaders today should figure out how to write the Enterprise Possibilities for our Grandchildren, so those institutions will be there for them.