CloudBlog caught up with Phil Wainewright, a leading pundit on all things cloud, in London during Cloudforce. I caution that during the video, it appears that Phil has gone into witness protection as the video camera and videographer grapple with a dynamic London dusk. That’s one area of cloud that we’ll need to work on with Phil … clearly.
As he academically and clinically dismantles the notions that the enterprise is some sort of separate beast that should be kept out of the hands of the people who actually stand to benefit from it, Wainewright describes a fiction that has resulted in the separation of the “enterprise” from its own internal consumers.
The software that enterprises implemented actually has forced companies into large monolithic buildings just to run and house the code and servers. But behemoth code has the effect of driving a wedge between people. The software drove them apart, resulting in the creation of different departments that even while housed in the same buildings could not or would not communicate with each other despite having similar goals.
Wainewright tears into traditional enterprise companies as being mainstream but ignorant of the surroundings. he questions how Google could become an enterprise player without Oracle or SAP even knowing it. How could they not see that internet advertising monetization was going to be a true enterprise concern? The traditional companies simply had no app for that.
Wainewright then talks about the rise of the social web. With social technologies, the enterprise brings people together to achieve a common business pursuit.
