It is called “the garage effect” and it is a nod to the humble origins of some of the giant companies in Silicon Valley. David Hunter, chief technology officer, platform security at VMware, predicts the rise of the ‘garage effect’ for people working in today’s cloud and virtualised environments.
Fifteen years ago, setting up start ups required “pretty hard investment”, Hunter says. With the cloud and virtualised environments, the capital expense for start ups is “decreasing dramatically”.
“You don’t have to build and construct your own virtual environment,” he says. “You can build things in these new [cloud-based] frameworks… You put it in your USB, plug it in your laptop and you have all the development resources you need.”
“In things like Foundry, [VMware’s open platform-as-a-service], you put your apps there, develop it, write it. It is becoming easier and easier. You are going to have more and more players in the scene, more capability for people trying to do this.”
He says for CIOs, this is a great way to take advantage of virtualised environments. “This is an opportunity to provide ‘garages’ for innovative efforts and activities inside your own department or company.”
“You can incorporate this as a CIO into your own infrastructure, where you encourage innovation at a very fast pace. You could actually have a place where you start your own mini-innovation centre for some of your developers or apps developers.
“It is easily managed, easily controlled,” he says, adding that the IT department of the US Department of Defense is using a similar model.
Mainframe use going strong
IT departments across the globe expect their mainframe systems to grow with the development of mobile and cloud services.
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These are among the findings of the Sixth Annual Worldwide Mainframe Survey conducted by BMC. The survey finds an overwhelming 91 percent of respondents in Australia and New Zealand believe the mainframe is a viable platform.
“Australia and New Zealand are still some years away from a truly cloud-enabled economy so the vast majority of organisations will continue to purchase mainframes and servers to run their critical workloads,” says James Russell, vice president of mainframe service management at BMC.
The survey finds mainframe skills continue to be a key concern. Some of the ways companies address this are through internal training, hiring experienced external candidates, cross training, hiring of university and college graduates and using more intelligent software tools.
The last include automation tools, which allow companies to have fewer mainframe staff to run some regular tasks.
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