One of the most significant trends driving change in the technology industry in recent years is the move to consumerization of infrastructure.
A prominent example is the wide adoption of consumer-influenced communications messaging apps such as Slack and Teams. However, the consumerization influence extends far beyond these individual apps.
Consumerization has transformed the underlying philosophy of how infrastructure companies run their business and sell to customers. As a result, the entire stack of enterprise infrastructure, its technology and business models have been upended. This has brought many benefits to enterprise customers, including better usability, speed, transparency and reduced cost.
Historically, the infrastructure industry was heavily siloed, with separate controls and management for each individual piece of the enterprise stack. The tools to manage these products included Common Language Interface and static visuals. At that time, infrastructure, such as storage was provided as a raw product. The customer’s IT staff would need to build on top of that product to gather basic intelligence or insights into usage.
But today, vendors provide a vast range of services on top of this raw infrastructure, from cybersecurity to analytics to provisioning and scaling of resources. Early moves came from companies such as Amazon and Google, which adopted principles and innovations that first appeared in consumer technology. IT professionals who had consumer apps for personal use saw no reason why similar advanced tools couldn’t be available for the enterprise and came to expect them at work as well.
With these new tools, enterprise infrastructure became much more user-friendly, improving ease of use, providing consumer-like app interfaces, automating tasks, enabling critical alerts and providing real-time updates. So, management of tools became much streamlined. In addition, integration and bundling of services made it possible for IT professionals to more easily oversee their entire stack and all metrics they needed. Other tools such as sustainability planning have also become common.
This is akin to consumer-facing products such as Smart Grids, which monitor and intelligently optimize energy use. They provide consumers with data and graphics that inform the consumer about, for example, what their usage is during higher-cost times of the day compared to lower-cost times. These networks can also automatically take actions to save energy or costs based on consumer or utility preferences.
Similarly, today’s storage, networking, cloud and database systems can automatically tier customers’ usage based on specific benchmarks and provide analytics and visualization for customers. These systems can also automatically take actions to ensure cost efficiency, sustainability and optimal performance.
How did this all happen? The infrastructure industry has evolved in five ways to bring consumerization to the enterprise.
First, infrastructure has evolved from fixed products to become scalable and modular. Previously, infrastructure providers sold static products, so they didn’t have to be flexible. But today, providers consider scalability, cost and flexibility. If data needs spike, architecture shouldseamlessly scale to fit those needs. If needs drop, the infrastructure can adjust to save costs. Just as consumer plans can be quickly changed, infrastructure apps must also be easily scalable.
Similarly, the architecture is now much more flexible and modular. If a customer wants to add or expand into other services or has other needs, the infrastructure can easily integrate with those other key tools. To scale, it has to be able to integrate with additional services. This is part of the ease of use that consumerization has brought to the enterprise.
Secondly, to be scalable and adjust up or down in response to market changes or customer needs, infrastructure systems now are expected to be cloud ready. Cloud-based systems enable customers to save costs by paying only for what they need. In addition, companies do not have to maintain physical data centers. Cloud systems also offer advantages such as better cybersecurity. and disaster recovery support and remote work convenience.
Third, interoperability is a key feature. Customers don’t want to use a service in isolation. Because companies often use multiple vendors together, infrastructure must be able to work across different services.
In addition, customers love bundled services because it provides them with the simplicity of a combined suite of services. For example, integrating analytics, compute and maintenance is a differentiator. Partners are now critical to a successful offering. Infrastructure providersrely on partnerships to provide end-to-end solutions for customers. Because bundled full-service offerings are so popular, vendors must find the right partners and creative marketing. Through its various partnerships, Palo Alto Networks, initially a security product, now claims “Security as an Experience.”
Fourth, the industry-wide move to subscription models is a clear example of the consumerization of the enterprise. Just as consumers experience the convenience of a Netflix or Spotify account, enterprise IT professionals also want subscription models. These models enable companies to move from large capital expenditures with attendant ownership and maintenance costs and instead engage with subscription models that provide more predictable expenses. They also allow companies to offload the complexity of managing owned infrastructure hardware. Finally, subscription models give companies the flexibility to start small, experiment with a new project or business line with minimal risk, and then quickly expand when needed. Subscription models benefit vendors, providing more predictable revenue, reducing retention costs and enabling them to invest more back into innovation.
Fifth, community and educational training are standard in making these services successful. While the concept of a community was once thought to be just for consumer-facing products and services, they are now essential for the enterprise. For example, Kubernetes has a strong community of developers who provide feedback, insights, improvements, governance, networking, support and bug fixes. Moreover, a community provides a broader group of evangelists for companies, which is invaluable in promoting a brand and providing helpful information to existing and potential new customers.
Training for both customers and a company’s sales representatives is essential for making a product successful. Companies cannot just launch a product and move on. They must provide a range of information and training so that customers can get the full benefits of a product.
Strategic considerations
In this new consumerization framework of enterprise infrastructure, vendors must consider much more than just selling one product. They can’t just focus on one small slice of their customer’s stack. They must think about the entire outcome for a customer. That’s a good thing because the customer benefits.
In the scramble to secure the best partners and maintain the best leverage among competitors, vendors want to be the platform other companies build upon, not vice versa. That’s how vendors become industry leaders. This requires a range of strategic considerations about product positioning, pricing, margins and the like. Ultimately, under this consumerization framework, vendors want to provide the most convenient, easy-to-use, scalable, interoperable and cost-effective product. For the end customer, that is a major win.
The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not represent The Fast Mode. While information provided in this post is obtained from sources believed by The Fast Mode to be reliable, The Fast Mode is not liable for any losses or damages arising from any information limitations, changes, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, omissions or errors contained therein. The heading is for ease of reference and shall not be deemed to influence the information presented.
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