The next generational shift in enterprise infrastructure has arrived

by Michael Yamnitsky, techcrunch.com

Cloud computing is driving growth at 3 of the 5 most valuable companies in the world. AI will impact jobs only as quickly as AI-powered business software evolves. These are just two of the ramifications of disruptions in enterprise technology permeating mainstream media.

Yet the inner workings of the tightly knit enterprise software industry are rarely publicized. Most talented engineers flock to Instagram and Snapchat where they help The Kardashians hyper-optimize selfies. Taking part in the B2B subculture of Silicon Valley feels like a second-rate option.

Whereas consumer tech has the Mary Meeker report for an aggregate view of industry trends, enterprise infrastructure was missing a public perspective to explain what we believe is a seismic new wave that only comes once every 10 years — the shift from cloud to what Jerry Chen of Greylock aptly calls systems of intelligence.

We’re launching a report series that gets into the details on how systems of intelligence changes the rules of the game spanning the tech industry and beyond. The full deck can be viewed here. With this key inflection point, our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters. Perhaps it will get new talent excited about the enterprise.

Our perspectives are shaped by anecdotal evidence based on our interactions with entrepreneurs, corporate customers, and big tech leaders defining this new wave. By no means will most of my predictions be correct, but my purpose is to put a stake in the ground and start the discussion on this industry shift.

Onwards to what matters — the trends. Our report highlights five key themes:

• A mini AI crash will shine light on systems of intelligence
• Systems of intelligence = gold rush for entrepreneurs
• Cloud native reshapes middleware into a powerful enabler of systems of intelligence
• The security ecosystem will reorganize itself into systems of intelligence
• Industrial (IoT) systems of intelligence need distributed infrastructure to catch up

Behind each of these themes are opportunities for early-stage entrepreneurs and lessons learned from the field………………………………………………..

Who isn’t building Systems of Intelligence? The ones who are building just about everything else — Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Clayton Christensen recently tweeted “any strategy is (at best) only temporarily correct.” At least now, the strategy for enterprise technology startups is Systems Of Intelligence.

Cloud native reshapes middleware into a powerful enabler of systems of intelligence:

Systems of intelligence must ride on nimble infrastructure. Cloud native architectures have the horsepower. As the new cloud native crest rises, problems that required dedicated solutions in the previous cloud wave become invisible functions embedded in the background of a leaner, meaner architecture.

Traditional middleware (i.e. enterprise service buses, complex event processing, application servers) are disappearing as these functions get embedded in code. Service meshes abstract networking functions via lightweight proxies.

The big data stack is crumbling as Hadoop gets replaced by new tools natively integrated with cloud native workload schedulers. As old systems shed, new ones powering the Systems Of Intelligence revolution are emerging…………………………………

“Middleware market isn’t dead, it’s just evolving” ………………    Read the complete article if you feel like  it!

DCL: I have read the complete article, several times. And I’ve yet to uncover exactly what is new in “Systems of Intelligence” (SOI’s). Maybe it’s simply something the author is predicting is going to happen. And when it does, we’ll label them SOI’s. But one thing seems clear to me, and that is,  this author doesn’t know what complex event processing is. It is a fact these days that what passes for CEP in most systems is a very small facit of CEP, one that this author has already  relegated to Middleware. This elementary form of CEP is usually without any hierarchical aggregation of events into higher level abstractions that SOI’s could use in their analytics so as to make them “intelligent systems”. But  I think this article is challenging in that it does force one to think, well perhaps Big Data, IoT, CEP and AI will all play a role in the building of a System Of Intelligence, when it happens!