The value is not in what it is, but what you do with it

Tanium has the same transformative power for your IT like the intermodal shipping container had for the world economy. And it faces similar challenges in its adoption.

IT with legacy tools:

IT with Tanium:

All that drove the docks, the warehouses, the factories and the inherent complexity and friction out of the New York on the picture was this patch of land across the Hudson River over in Port Elisabeth, NJ:

And Tanium has the same transformative power for your IT like the intermodal shipping container has for the world economy. And it faces similar challenges in its adoption. Let me explain why and how:

In short, like the shipping container, Tanium is the most valuable when you transform the way you look at and solve the whole problem. Once you do, the value is so immense, you won’t look back. But to get there, you have to overcome all non-technical challenges that defend the inefficient status quo.

In detail, let's start with an abbreviated history of the intermodal shipping container and into which world it was pushed when it came about (c.f. [1] "The Box" by Marc Levinson):

Legacy box freight handling was limiting manufacturing business growth in multiple ways, each being a huge friction of either cost, flexibility or geographical reach:?

- Manufacturing and trading business were forced to compete for premium space close to the harbour to minimize supply chain lengths and costs. Factories near the ships were good.

- Complex handling and multiple loading and offloading in cramped harbour space by disconnected transport chain participants of trains, trucks, barges, warehouses, dockworkers and ships were extremely costly

- Truck access was clogging up streets and limited the throughput of harbour are streets

- Red-tape, union controlled warehouse and longshore men labour added cost through frequent strikes and rigid processes and entitlements

- Berth time increases disproportionally with ship size and made scaling ships over a certain size impractical.

- High loss rate of goods on route due to damage, negligence and theft had to be priced into the product and/or insured against.

When the intermodal shipping container arrived in 1956, astonishingly little in world freight shipping, as described above, changed though, despite all the obvious drawbacks. The end-to-end container system was completely invented, technically available, and after its first use on the New Jersey - Houston route had proven its practicality and cost efficiency.

It still took decades, though, before containers effectively turned into the dominating shipping format that transformed our world and enabled the global economy we live in today. And we don't want to look back.

Why did it take so long for containers to develop the momentum that then changed the world? After all, the technology of the box itself, the interlocking systems, the cranes and specifications had stayed the same since it's initial introduction.

The containers benefits were conceptually obvious, once you look at the shipping problem end-to-end:

- Ships berth times become measured in hours instead of previously days and weeks

- End-to-end transportation services become viable from anywhere on the planet to everywhere and a single purchase item

- Leveraging global manufacturing capabilities and markets for supply and delivery for factories far off any harbour are becoming cheap and thus feasible everywhere. Your manufacturing can be anywhere and compete with everyone.

- Businesses can design and execute their product supply chain and sales reach on a world scale, irrespective of locality.

- Loss to damage and theft practically vanish instantly, due to everything being transported in end-to-end locked and sealed boxes.

So, what kept the container from immediate widespread adoption after its introduction was not technical lack of capability. Instead, the individual industry players kept measuring potential befit of the shipping container with their old yardsticks and failed to find clear value for themselves in their own isolated business scope and thus resisted any change.

- Replacing a box freight loading truck with one that carries a shipping container in itself does not add any value. For a trucking company.

- Insisting on unloading containers into pier warehouses with docker gangs and loading them again with stevedore crews before stacking them on a ship did not add value to the harbour operation.

- Shipping container boxes instead of loose freight does not reduce the shipping line's ship operations cost themselves

- Factories producing goods want to ship as soon as the orders are coming off the production line. They would need to add planning to actually always fill a container first before it is hauled off the yard, which is not how they want to serve their customers.

And yet, today we are looking at a world where no-one in their right mind would want to go back to the times of legacy shipping. Ever. So what took so long, and how did it eventually happen?

In short, the world was slow to learned how to think its transport problems with shipping container at the centre and building businesses taking container shipping as a given that can be leveraged for business optimisation.

Once it did, about 20 or so years after its first introduction, global container adoption came in a landslide and removed orders of magnitude of friction (i.e. cost) from businesses globally. It enabled our global economy of today, where supply chains routinely reach around the planet multiple times and markets can be served globally.

So what made the transformation finally happen? The capabilities of the technology in the meantime had not changed after all.

?A handful of compelling use-cases pioneered an initial adoption scale and taught businesses to "think shipping container":

- The US Army used containers for efficient end-to-end logistics for its remote engagement in the Vietnam War, that had no scalable harbour infrastructure in the country when the campaign started.

- The return traffic created huge empty eastbound capacity across the Pacific for years that was leveraged by Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers that could use this new shipping format, their products nicely protected from theft and damage in the sealed container boxes end-to-end. Think Panasonic, Toshiba and Sony.

- A number of players entered the scene who were not traditional shipping line operators of the old guard. Instead of looking at containers as a feature extension of their traditional shipping line business, they considered the intermodal shipping container to be the business and optimized everything around it. Think MSC, Maersk and Evergreen.?

The same can be observed for Tanium: Tanium as a game changing platform technology that has been around for more than a decade and is battle proven with its vast spectrum of uses in the largest networks. Once people start to "think Tanium", they cannot imagine ever going back to the old, inefficient ways with legacy tools.

Still, organizations often struggle to find value in their first steps of Tanium adoption.

The simple reason for this turns out to be, that they succumb to the same fallacy of the early shipping industry players: Those who struggle, try to assess the value of this categorically different end-to-end platform as a drop-in replacement for their already existing legacy tools within their existing processes and policies. They look at it from within their turf boundaries, processes, policies and overly specific regulations and prescriptions. This is bound to fail.

The game-changing reduction of friction across IT comes when you re-think your actual? IT cybersecurity, operations and compliance problems in Tanium and start leveraging it as a strategic platform.

The way to get there, like in the history of the shipping container, is to find compelling, initial high-value use-cases to start with, that provide spare capacity (Tanium is in place already) to other teams and their needs for quick wins and compelling simplicity. Eventually, teams and strategic initiatives will emerge that will "think Tanium" first and re-define problems such that they avoid traditional friction by simply not replication what was previously built into the processes due to the limitations of the legacy tools.

My prediction thus is, that the first full-stack managed security and IT operations service provider who delivers everything with Tanium at the centre end-to-end will become the MSC, Maersk or Evergreen of the MSSP market.

[1] "The Box - How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" - Marc Levinson https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/the-box