What The Big Bang Theory Can Teach You About The Evolution Of Technology

by Chris Gabriel, CTO, Logicalis Group

You hear a lot of talk about integrated infrastructures these days. Cutting through the jargon, these pre-packaged data centers save huge amounts of money, and simplify your business operations.

Using them is a fantastically great idea—it's practically free money—but they didn't seem like it when they first emerged. There's a broader business lesson here:

You must constantly re-evaluate as things evolve.

Let Me Tell You A Story

Scientists at CERN have spent billions building the Large Hadron Collider, to simulate the very second our universe was created.

The whole point of this colossal machine is to recreate the moment when most scientists believe everything started; not a minute afterwards, or a second, but the first few millionths of a second.

Now I don’t want to sound like a party pooper, but if you were around 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate aftermath of the big bang might have seemed a bit pointless. There wasn’t even any matter, in the sense that we think of it—just a load of very hot, incredibly fast-moving stuff. [No hatemail from physicists, please -Ed.]

Who really wants to look at that, when you can simply wonder at the universe as it is today? You couldn’t stand on a hilltop, gazing up at the stars, because they didn’t exist.

But We All Have To Start Somewhere

Technology is just the same. Even the most fabulous technology today started as pretty useless inventions—comical even.

Have you seen a picture of the first mouse, designed by Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute? And then there’s that first disk drive: Today, you could fit about 5 billion times the storage in the same space.

If you only see the technology when it first launches, you’ll often write it off as the dullest, daftest thing you’d ever seen.

But We Have The Benefit Of Hindsight

Technology evolution takes an early concept, and turns it into something we marvel at.

Technologies evolve as somebody enhances them and extends their capabilities. Sooner or later, we realize their impact on our life or on our business.

What we have to do is to keep looking at them afresh—over and over again—without assuming they’re the same thing that was initially put in front of us. Consumers are fantastic at this. In business, not so much.

We see something launched and dismiss it as not relevant to us, to our organization, or to our problems. Perhaps we’re already solving that problem with something else, and the thing in front of our eyes only seems marginally better.

This is a natural thing to do. The trick is to be able to revisit it with fresh eyes and an open mind, to see how it might have evolved.

Integrated Infrastructures Are A Great Example

Some big technology vendors offer pre-assembled, pre-tested data center architectures, to solve some specific business or technology challenge.

When integrated infrastructures first appeared, I was as dismissive as the next person: All that work, all that testing, all that marketing, for something that really only solves one or two problems? What’s the point?

But we need to have the patience to see them evolve into something bigger. FlexPod is one such example. When launched five years ago by Cisco and NetApp, with only one supported application, I couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. It solved a couple of issues my customers were having, but that was all.

But I now call this my big-bang moment.

I was looking at something in a split second. I was judging the universe we see today by just the start of something. That initial spark of light only hinted at what was to come.

Fast-Forward Five Years:

FlexPod is one of the industry’s fastest growing and most popular integrated-infrastructure data center solutions. Why?

Because it’s evolved, been added to, had other things collide into it: New partners, new applications, new management tools, and much more.

Rather than solving a single problem, it’s now a superb solution for problems experienced by organizations of all sizes, including service providers. For example, you can:

See dramatic costs-savings for Oracle databases (as much as 45% in hardware and software).
Migrate SAP HANA from expensive, legacy servers.
Be prepared for disasters without buying duplicate, idle equipment.
Simplify and standardize on a validated design.

Forward-thinking organizations using it include the Sauber F1 Team and Loughborough University.

I asked Cisco's CIO, Rebecca Jacoby, to sum up. “Now that the idea of integrated infrastructures has matured, forward-thinking IT leaders recognize the benefits in cost savings, reliability, simplicity and supportability.”

The Bottom Line

Of course, my message isn’t just “look at FlexPod.”

My message is to make sure you revisit what you’ve previously seen and dismissed. Re-evaluate it afresh every now and again.

Watch how things change—otherwise you might miss a marvelous opportunity.

What's your take? Weigh in with a comment below, and follow Chris Gabriel: @Chris_Gabriel1 (Twitter).

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