DO YOU WANT ICE? - OR, DO YOU WANT ICE?

So, what does ice have to do with anything? I promise if you humor me, you will be able to see the connection I’m trying to make.

It’s 2023 and I think we all have to admit that technology has and will continue to make our lives better.

I remember a time not too long ago that I would map out directions to a destination, transposing them onto a notepad before starting my trip.??Even then, I’d still have to stop at a local gas station for directions.

Who can remember how communicating with your peers at work has improved? We went from pagers, to two-way pagers, to flip phones to smartphones. The progress has been enormous.

So, what prompts me to write this article now? I recently attended a customer meeting where I was asked a question that I’m usually asked.??“Why should we buy Enterprise Software rather than continued use of an Opensource product?”??I’m sure I’ll get lots of feedback on Opensource as the better option but I think otherwise.

Our jobs in IT is to make technology simple. To build products that make people’s lives better. To allow those people who we build products for, to make the lives of their own customers (internal and external) better. Years ago, it was noted that over eighty-percent of the time those working in IT was spent “keeping the lights on”. It hit me during a recent customer meeting that this was still the case. After asking my customer about their mandate(s) for 2023 I was truly shocked to hear the first response as “keep the lights on”.??I was expecting that I would hear things such as “close two data centers by July” or “move half of our workloads to the cloud”. This was not the case.??I would have thought that the response would have been more aligned to delivering applications and capabilities (innovating) for their customers to use their platform(s) better and to make their own internal networks secure.

Additionally, while describing to them a few of the reasons for using enterprise software I was faced with a response that truly surprised me.??While speaking about the differences of “build vs buy” and that of automation I discussed some of the benefits of our platforms. That response was “I can do that for free using [a list of about six other free products]". That to me sounded extremely difficult and even complex and dangerous.

Whichever type of company you work for - be it finance, manufacturing, healthcare, or retail the problem that remains is an integration problem. Think of it this way; every product you add to work with another creates complexity and difficulty. It’s an “n-squared” problem.?Using twelve ‘free’ products doesn’t mean that you integrate simply the twelve you’re using.??You need to ensure that each of the twelve works with the other twelve – or, 144.??The costs to the business are hard to quantify - Time to Market, Cost of DIY, Integration costs, support costs, downtime costs, and more. Still, I’d submit that it’s even greater than the answer to that mathematical problem. The networks, environments, and platforms that you’re building and running are production networks. They run your most critical applications while also supporting an internal and external customer base. Running these production networks with added (and unnecessary) complexity is a direction that can be avoided.?

Rather than doing the integration work for hundreds of point products, wouldn’t you agree that our value to the companies at which we work and for our customers should be – researching breaches and vulnerabilities and protecting our users from bad actors, creating governance around access, authorization and use of critical resources, being able to create dynamic environments that scale with the ability to add or remove access quickly, or building global networks that are automated and don’t require constant manual reconstruction?

Which brings me to the question about ice. More than a century ago before refrigeration had been invented, the way to keep things cold was to use ice of course. Procuring the ice however wasn’t as simple as it seems. Gather the horses, ice cutters, resources (humans). Transport everything to the frozen river.??Cut perpendicular grooves in the ice and then cut down into the grooves about a foot or two. When done, gather the ice to transport it back to home or to town.?

Or, you can just have ice.

The goal of the ice wasn’t about making the ice as an end in itself.??It was a means to an end. It was about keeping your food cold and for longer periods of time before they perished.?

And so it is with building global networks. It’s not about building the network and making the building of it complex.??It’s about what we can do with the networks we’re building.?That's our value to the business.

Photo Credits:

1/ Primer Magazine - The Surprising Importance & History Of Using Great Ice In Your Cocktails

2/ Appliance Pros - Refrigerator Ice Maker

3/ APG News - IMCOM customers make themselves heard through ICE