Oracle and Sun focus on the customer not on the technology

Implications: 1.  Providing services to a customer is the way to grow revenue.  2.  The IT industry continues to consolidate.

Analysis: The focus on the customer is the new play, the old play, and the only play that matters.   Sun used to be the dot in dot.com and now they are focused on opensource that makes money on services.  And Oracle has bought just about every customer base they can find so they can become the single source of software solutions for customers.  Oracle's value of being the single source for customers is that you can offer all of the services to integrate the solutions.

The article also mentions Software as a service as well.  SAAS will become a service business as well.  SAAS will result in more business consulting in the long term because the complexity of SAAS software will grow until the same integration challenges will exist in SAAS as they do in opensource and monolithic systems.

This is good news for business as IT will be finally focused on business solutions.  The mundane parts of IT will either be outsourced to some third party or the solution will be delivered as a service.  Either way, the IT organization will become a business process organization helping to drive business innovation thru process improvement.  There still will be technology, but it will the application of technology that matters, not the technology.

This is good new for IT as well because IT will finally matter.  It is hard to operate any large business (or small for that matter). Knowledge on how to make the business easy to run is the new competitive advantage.  The web made it easy for business to sell products and has changed the way products are delivered. 

But companies have only begun to transform themselves to leverage the web.  We have yet to see the next wave of product design innovation that the web will bring.  Thus far, we have seen cost reductions by outsourcing, but someday we will see 24 hours a day continuous development of products that could shorten the time to market by three times the standard one shift model much of development still works under.  Realtime manufacturing will get a boost over the next 20 years as the supply chain becomes interconnected.  These are just a few of the many business process opportunities that have yet to be delivered.

It is good to see the maturing of the software industry into a service industry.  And it is good to see the software visionaries leading this change.  The industry has matured and is focused on the customer.  This will create some chaos in the IT industry.  Some IT veterans will not be able to make the shift and others will emerge.  Some cobol programmers never made it to client / server, some client / server programmers never made it to the web, and now some IT people will not make it to the "business process web".

The next ten years will be a bumpy ride, but one that will be an interesting inflection point.