Right now we’re celebrating TEN, our tin anniversary, yes 10 years of continuous commentary and curmudgeonly criticism of changing trends in enterprise application environments. Also, now that our latest 2024 Intellyx Digital Innovator Awards are going out, we are taking this time to reflect on the thousands of thought leadership pieces about digital transformation and related topics we’ve put out.
I have been part of this journey as an analyst for almost six years, but before that, I was on the maiden voyage here as a customer—as a vendor marketing leader at ITKO, CA, and Skytap, and even before that as a client of Jason Bloomberg’s previous firm ZapThink, which heralded the advent of Agile Development and SOA-based applications.
What is the retail value of digital transformation?
I remember in my youth, Willie Nelson was in a bit of tax trouble with the IRS and came out with a solo acoustic album of some of his best-loved tunes “Who’ll buy my memories?” to pay down some of his outstanding liens. Kind of a cool idea to get his fans to help him out.
We’re in a similar retrospective mode for the Intellyx mission of covering digital transformation (or DX), which is why we’re putting out this special commemorative 10th Anniversary Edition Intellyx plate, with shipping and handling and a free annual subscription included, if you act now.
Ten years ago, digital transformation was on the tongue of almost every executive. But to other analysts, and our vendor counterparts in analyst relations and product marketing, it seemed everyone was already tired of DX.
It’s trite. Hackneyed. All played out, like a bunch of dads with real jobs playing classic rock covers at midnight.
Digital transformation may seem to be getting old to analysts, but for enterprises, the DX initiative is constantly born anew. Enterprises are on their second or third attempt at it—they may have failed because they put technology selections ahead of prioritizing digital capabilities that meet genuine customer needs.
Enterprises still see the value of DX. Their competitive futures depend on it, but further, they need to pay down some of the technical debt that they accumulated while not improving their digital capabilities.
We’ve come a long way baby
Ten years ago, enterprises were just starting to get serious about DevOps, mobile computing, business process automation, and cloud data warehouses.
“I founded the company on June 1, 2014. It is now older than many of our clients, and it has outlived several others.
“We’ve focused on enterprise digital transformation since the beginning, but the specifics of that focus area have evolved over the years.
“Today, we spend much of our time writing about AI, cybersecurity, cloud native computing, and mainframe modernization. Topics like SD-WAN and RPA have come and gone.”
– June 1 post by Intellyx founder and Managing Director, Jason Bloomberg
We are 10, and so is cloud native development
From the swirl of activity around cloud computing, web services and containers came a new orchestration abstraction layer that changed everything: Kubernetes. And as it turns out, Kubernetes is also turning 10 this week! [Check out this virtual birthday bash June 6 from Linux Foundation.]
Now, there are many more aspects and components involved in becoming cloud native than deploying K8s clusters—service meshes, streaming data pipelines, configuration automation, API gateways, see the hundreds of projects in the latest CNCF landscape.
So much innovation initially slowed adoption, due to the cognitive load required for developers and operations teams to keep track of everything required for a true cloud native application. Newer management platforms are reducing administrative burdens and increasing automation, as Kubernetes enters mainstream use.
Thriving through the pandemic
By far, I think the COVID pandemic caused the biggest shift we’ve seen over the last decade. Since we have always been itinerant analysts with our own agency, our work locations never mattered that much.
But for the rest of the world of end user enterprises and vendors we talked to, 2020 dealt a heavy blow to many companies that were never equipped to move out of the office.
The pandemic forced businesses to quickly develop a ‘digital backbone’ or perish, and realign business capabilities as digital services whenever possible. I even felt a sense of ‘digital survivor’s guilt’ having a 100% remote job I could continue without interruption.
Though, we couldn’t have been happier than in 2022-23 when real industry events returned, along with so many personal interactions we had missed.
The Intellyx Take
Life is short, especially in technology. A three-year employee is often the grizzled veteran at the top of the seniority stack.
The fleeting nature of the technology analysis game Intellyx plays is paralleled by the ephemerality of cloud native microservices. So let’s celebrate this milestone while it’s right here in front of us.
During the last ten years, many of our favorite companies and client contacts have chosen to sell their businesses or retire from tech altogether. But we’ve also had the privilege of meeting brilliant founders and engineers, and seeing transformational innovation play out right in front of us, often before it gets out to the general public.
That, my dear readers, is why digital transformation never gets old.
Copyright ©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI chatbot was used to write this article. Image source: Custom plate illustration by kingplinker.
