The Changing Roles of System Integrators

The movie Hidden Figures set in 1960’s is about three women who made extraordinary contributions under very difficult circumstances towards the launch of Friendship 7 at NASA. While the movie is about extraordinary people and missions, there is one component that is relevant to this conversation. The movie includes stories about the use of IBM-7090 introduced to assist with complex computations.

Starting in 60’s, a select few companies such as IBM, created a number of solutions that helped governments and businesses computerize their operations and set a stage that changed future forever. During that time, computers were large, clunky and complex entities that were only understood by hardcore technologists.  So, companies like IBM created complete solutions, where the customer is provided everything from hardware, software, business applications, accessories, support and everything in between. Their customers hence didn’t have to worry about anything. This also meant that the solution providers (such as IBM) ensured that their solutions were well designed, developed and implemented as they owned the entire suite of implementation.

But, there was one problem. The packaged solutions that included everything came with a hefty price tag. This caused few challenges. Not everybody could afford such solutions. And corporates started to notice the heavy cost of such implementations. But, as there were very few competitors and the knowledge of computers outside that industry was limited, this went on for a few decades.

As 80’s started roll off and 90’s came in, and the capabilities of computers were better understood, entrepreneur technologists keen to break this grip of select few companies, created individual components off the whole suite of solutions provided by IBM and others. Some of them went on to create and commercialize operating systems, databases, accessories (such as hard drives, printers, etc.) and started to market those products. Suddenly, the industry went from a handful of large companies that provided end-to-end solutions to thousands of companies that produced one portion of the entire solution.

This provided customers a respite from a select few monopolistic solutions, and a cost effective flexibility to choose from a wide variety of options based on their specific needs. But, when it came to a complete implementation, now, customers were responsible for purchasing all of these components and assemble/integrate them together to create a complete solution.

Around the same time, few other major changes were taking place.

The 90’s saw the coming of age for the Internet. This essentially changed the way people communicated and more so how businesses functioned. At the same time, the world was also changing with a number of countries opening their markets and the global trade reaching a different level of sophistication, which required a different level of computerization. This meant, a customer (a company or a government) had to not only integrate business components between its own departments, but they had to also integrate into an environment outside their traditional borders with different cultures, business practices and method of doing business.

And this necessitated and created a new vertical called Systems Integrators. These SI’s, as they came to be called, helped customers find and implement solutions by providing services to bring together a cacophony of solutions offered by thousands of vendors and across geographies. SI’s brought skills and capabilities by connecting business needs with technology solutions and removing boundaries which an individual customer would otherwise not be able to achieve. Recognizing the changing industry, even traditional companies like IBM that historically created all of the solutions on their own, jumped into being SI’s.

At this stage, customers started to demand even more sophisticated solutions to solve their ever increasing business complexity, fueled by growth of e-Commerce and all that it brought to bear. And vendors acknowledged and created more sophisticated solutions thus increasing the complexity of implementations and in the process increasing demand for SI’s. Now, SI’s became a permanent fixture in almost all of the industries.

However, this model required that all of these vendor solutions are brought to customer’s premises (On Prem) and assembled /Integrated together to make it a complete solution. These On Prem solutions, thus brought together had to be subsequently maintained and supported by the customer for the long haul. And, given constant changes in technology, customers had to constantly invest into upgrades and all of the challenges that came with it.

History repeats itself, and customers started to look for solutions to the above problem and again, technologists and entrepreneurs came up with the next level of capabilities and introduced them as Cloud based solutions. This worked (sort of) hand-in-hand with extensive use of Agile based development and CI/CD (Continuous  Integration/Continuous Delivery) that made vendor solutions, a living entity that constantly grows to meet business needs, as opposed to a system that is developed-installed-and-used for a number of years with limited changes.

On one level, this means, a customer now does not have to worry about setting up a computer solution from ground up (and all of the upfront expenses), but can just purchase services from a vendor that offers their entire solution on a Cloud and the customer can have these solutions configured to their specific needs.  With CI/CD models in place, customers can rely on the vendor to constantly upgrade their system to meet changing business needs.

As Cloud solutions become mature and reliable, they eliminate challenges (to customers) of maintaining technology and keeping them up to date. Cloud vendors can make their solutions available across the globe, supporting changing government regulations and being up to date with changes to underlying technologies. At least, that’s the promise, so far achieved by a select few.

Historically, large SI practices were built based on business needs from late 90’s and early 2000’s. They were designed to support large end-to-end implementations bringing business and technology together from multiple vendors. The cloud based solutions are still evolving and SI’s are still needed to fulfill their traditional roles. However, as more and more vendor solutions start to mature on the cloud, the SI’s role continues to evolve by becoming a better integrator of multiple cloud solutions. The SI’s role of having to stand up/support an entire end-to-end system starts to reduce.

At times, it all feels the same. From a simplistic perspective, one can think that customers still need to configure the systems (either on the Cloud or On-Prem), they need to develop, build integration, test, implement and support. But, sophisticated Cloud solution vendors are creating solutions and encapsulating them with services of design/develop/test/support. Hence, some of these Cloud based vendors begin to take on the role of a typical SI.

However, most of the Cloud vendors offer only a subset of solutions required by customers to run their complete business. It means customers now have to contend with current systems that are On-Prem plus newer solutions on the cloud, all from different vendors and technologies that have to be integrated as one seamless solution.

Hence, SI’s now need to evolve to quickly understand the ready to use cloud solutions their customer are investing in and be able to integrate them with other solutions already in use. This requires SI’s to develop another level of sophistication, one that combines knowledge of business, technology and speed of implementation, but under a different setting, where SI’s have to hit the ground running.

Whatever the future holds, the SI’s role is changing, and with that, all of ours.

As always, your thoughts are appreciated.