Speech Summaries

Marc Andreessen Chairman and Co-founder Opsware Inc.

Automating Systems Management

Marc Andreessen, Chairman and Co-Founder, Opsware, Inc., discussed his vision of the change in the technology landscape over the next 15 years. Mr. Andreessen compared Internet adoption with the historical cycles of technology markets like radio, television, and personal computers. In the early years of the technology cycle, people didn't take new technology seriously. After a short while, there was an explosion of adoption and hype and later, a collapse when the deployments weren't living up to people’s expectations.

Mr. Andreessen argued that we are in the collapse phase right now with the Internet. But at some point, expectations will be so low that it will be easy to exceed them. The technology will continue to grow and will be widely adopted. Right now, companies are cleaning up the mess created by overbuilding in the late 1990s.

More and more, applications are run on many different servers. Mr. Andreessen believes that companies need to automate the management of servers, enabling an Organic IT environment. He argued that automation is a great way to protect against virus attacks and increase server utilization. Automating server management is the low-hanging fruit in moving to an Organic IT environment over the next several years.

Mr. Andreessen told attendees how Opsware helped Fox increase its server utilization from 25% to more than 80% by pooling server resources for Fox News, Fox Sports, and Fox Films. By changing the number of servers for each site to match loads using Opsware software, Fox was able to reduce the number of servers by 60%.

Mr. Andreessen believes that despite all of the industry consolidation, a multivendor software world will continue to exist.

Questions And Answers

Q: What barriers are there to Organic IT taking root?
A: The barriers to buying something new are currently very high. The sales cycle right now is nine months or longer. People are buying software to get immediate cost reductions. They aren't looking for ROI nine months out.

Q: When the cost of running an IT organization is reduced, where will the money go?
A: If you look historically at IT spending as a percentage of capital spending at companies, it has grown from 0% to 50% on a straight line. I think that this line will continue. Over the next five or 10 years, I think there will be a reallocation from the people running the hardware and software to development, either internally or externally.