In a recent presentation, Lew Cirne, CEO of application performance management vendor New Relic (it’s an anagram), revealed the company now has 5,000 customers and just one sales rep. That’s astonishing. Cirne points out that there’s a new class of customers for whom “there is no reason whatsoever for application performance management to be sold by a direct sales force.” If you’re building a cloud-based application on top of a standard Ruby, .Net or Java stack, much of the complexity has been factored out already, enabling a much simpler self-service sales model.
This is a profound shift in IT. Cirne’s prior company, Wily Technology, had all the trappings of a typical enterprise software company: lots of knobs and dials, complex on-site installations, high prices and lengthy sales cycles. Still, for customers deploying J2EE app servers, Wily’s products helped them find and fix performance issues that otherwise would have taken months to resolve. Wily did a great job back in the day; but things have changed. By moving to a cloud-based platform as a service the deployment model can now be dramatically simplified. New Relic illustrates a powerful trend: the consumerization of IT.
In the last 10 years, the web has brought us countless innovative technologies which enable consumers to get things done simply and without fuss, whether it’s finding information, buying goods and services, managing finances, sharing documents, communicating with friends, finding a job, setting up meetings, backing up a PC, or any number of other activities. So why, when you go to work in a typical large company, are the applications so bloated and complex? Why can’t we get the kind of simple, one-click deployment of applications and infrastructure that mirrors what’s going on in the consumer world?
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http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/the-consumerization-of-it/
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