Opening Up The VMware Innovation Process: Contrarian Computing

[GuestBlogger]

Here in VMware R&D, we are committed to innovation and the open flow of ideas. In that spirit, we’ve opened up our review process for new technology investments, seeking the wisdom of our blog readers in placing the most promising bets. We are focused today on contrarian computing trends...new concepts that appear to pull IT backward, but may hold promise.

Apology-Based Computing: A fundamentally new paradigm for IT that is illustrated by the Eventual Security model. For example, we can secure data eventually. If there is a breach we can cover up after the fact (i.e. Big Obfuscation) and give an apology. This is much more efficient than encrypting everything up front.

Big Obfuscation: New tools that enable ground-breaking analytics are unleashing Big Obfuscation (BO) by empowering really smart people to ask impressive-sounding questions of the data and generate hyper-voluminous reports replete with unintelligible statistics. Because what you really need is infinite, non-actionable detail - i.e. Tiny Data.

Bring-your-own-Wallet: IT will still provide the device, they just make employees pay for them.

Eventual Security: Security in the world of Big Data has become onerous. The goals of encrypted (Big) Data at Rest are at odds with the immediacy requirements of analytics. However, recent advances in Tiny Data hold promise. As the number of shards of data tends toward infinity, that data begins to Rest In Piece(s), in the form of a "RIP DB". Data that is in a RIP state need not be encrypted at all because there is no single point of access to the "whole" data! Eventual security is achieved by encrypting the result of the analytics, rather than the data feeds to analytics or the data itself.

SaaS-as-a-Service: We've come a long way with SaaS, allowing people to use applications without investing in their own infrastructure or operations staff. We'd like to take it one step forward to SaaS-as-a-Service (SaaSaaS). This takes it one step further and actually uses the application for you as well. Quite the time-saver!

Ultra Premium IT: For the aspirational enterprise, we are beginning to see the desire for hand-crafted IT. IT in british racing green, with burr walnut trim and the smell of luxurious leather. Automation is all well and good for making nuts and bolts, but we observe that some technology leaders would rather strut their stuff through owning the latest hand crafted IT. This is the kind of IT you can leave to your children. It will last a lifetime and is an appreciating asset, rather than mere CAPEX or OPEX.

What else do you see? How will this play out? Share your thoughts with us!

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