Platform as a Service

These past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about my professional life and the direction I want to take. In my travels, I have seen numerous job announcements for SAP consultants and SAP outposts as far south as New Zealand. I briefly gave thought to becoming one of these consultants, until I discovered Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) provider. Salesforce has created a web-application that manages the Marketing, Sales and Support cycle needed to keep and acquire customers. On top of that, they have created a place where developers can create modules to work in conjunction with their core application. The people at Salesforce like to call this Software as a Service (SaaS).

Naturally, I had heard of Salesforce some time ago and didn’t really look into it. As a military Communications Officer, the scope of what was important to me was very defined and anything outside of it, I had a tendency to disregard. But after witnessing the number of broken methodologies used to manage Customer Relationship cycles in the Air Force (especially the tracking of Performance Reports and Decorations, Help Desk operations and Remedy in particular), it was time I investigated.

As I went further down the rabbit hole, I came across Simon Wardley, over at his blog where he was discussing the “Commoditisation of IT.” I invite you to check out his video at the end of his post. Besides being funny, Simon’s theories are profound and highlight the necessity of open standards.

His speech got me thinking about the future of the US Air Force’s networks, which are now conglomerated across the major commands (Air Mobility Command, Air Combat Command, Air Force Material Command, US Air Forces Europe, etc.). This conglomeration was the result of the pooling of assets by Air Force Network Operation Security Centers (NOSCs). Life cycle costs for hardware were too much to bare as infrastructure improvements allowed for higher bandwidth to be transmitted across the country, CPU processing power increased and storage got cheaper and cheaper. Generals realized that the benefits of ubiquitous hardware were marginal. And while hardware for services, particularly email, were moved to centralized locations, remedy databases continued to be locally administered and many other services have not changed.

Air Force CTOs have gotten wiser and are identifying the costs for maintaining antiquated (and data isolated) software. As I have witnessed the hardware for desktops contract back into server rooms, and the deployment, albeit extremely late, of Sharepoint Portal and the implementation of collaborative workspaces, I believe in the next 10 years, the Air Force will also see the tools for management methodologies become more standardized and ubiquitous.

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