Speech Summaries

Charles Rutstein Vice President, Forrester Community Forrester Research, Inc.

The Organic IT Imperative

Charles Rutstein, Research Director, Forrester Research, talked about building the business case for Organic IT. He referenced how leaders at IBM and Hewlett-Packard are believers in Organic IT and are investing billions of dollars in this concept. His theme was to show at a high level how Organic IT will cut costs and how it will transform businesses.

Charles started by exploring a history of IT infrastructure from the perspective of two groups of people: IT folks and business folks. As technology evolved from mainframes to Internet computing, Charles stated that there has never been a time when both constituencies have been satisfied. He then outlined some important attributes of Organic IT, emphasizing abstraction, and explained that Forrester chose the word "Organic" because this type of infrastructure is adaptive, fluid, and self-healing.

In today's current technology infrastructure world, the process of integrating ERP applications would take months and possibly millions of dollars, but in the Organic IT world, it would only take a few weeks and at a very little cost. One of the ways this is possible is through abstraction -- removing the complexity from the front-end user. He also pointed out that Organic IT requires people to think about computing resources as a pool of resources that are shared among all applications and servers as they are needed.

Charles concluded by talking about the cost benefits of Organic IT, using components that companies already have. This is possible through massively higher utilization of hardware, dramatic increases of labor efficiency, and rapid, agile responses to business needs.

Questions And Answers

Q: What area of infrastructure should you focus on first to get started with Organic IT?
A: It doesn't really matter. Right now, it is a slow start. Focus on what your current investments are now and think about how to make those Organic.

Q: What is the role of Linux in Organic IT?
A: Linux is an abstracting force right now in the datacenter. It is an incredibly important part of Organic IT. In the next 10 to 15 years, datacenters will have only two operating systems -- Windows and Linux. Proprietary UNIX will disappear.

Q: People don't share budgets as readily as computers share data. How will culture need to change?
A: One way to solve this is to begin moving toward a centralized IT model. Having a centralized IT authority abstracts the IT needs from the rest of the company so it can work strictly to meet those needs.