What should Tech CEOs consider for the success of their Application Infrastructure business in 2019?
Somebody out there once said "never invest in a tech CEO that does wear a suit". As I was co-authoring a note on what Tech CEOs need to prioritize in 2019, I thought that as far as "tech-fashionistas" are concerned, while you can debate on T-shirts and suites, you can never discount the power of a hat: the Application Infrastructure and Middleware hat.
Jokes aside, it is a known fact that today end-user customers have business demands that need agility and flexibility to be enabled by their IT infrastructure. The net result is that those vendors failing to provide this, will be exposed to progressively shrinking deal sizes. As simple as that. At the same time we are seeing organizations that are adopting infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or SaaS, showing and ever increasing ambition for their cloud investments and inevitably they require platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities to extend their acquired services. Not only that, there are plenty of interesting technology areas of immediate interest to organizations and several are already on the horizon for which any savvy Tech CEO should have a product development plan or a partner ecosystem plan.
Put these macro trends together and you understand how crucial are products and services related to what we call Application Infrastructure and Middleware (AIM), the 30bn$ plus technology segment that sits in between the compute power and the highly visible applications world. This is where end-users (and should I dare to say investors?) should devote a particular attention to what many tec CEOs of the over 720 AIM vendors (see "Application Infrastructure and Middleware Market and Vendor Guide Cross-Reference Tool") have to say.
This is the area where you can immediately see how emerging, innovative technologies are utilized to support agility, flexibility and elasticity demands.
This is where the bulk of PaaS offerings reside (see "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2019") and are marketed through targeted messaging, packaging, and, most of all, partner relationships.
This is where the vendor "ecosystems" really matter and can bring to organizations tangible differentiation thanks to Application Infrastructure and Middleware Tech CEOs that have been able to steer their company's offerings towards fast-growing and strategic segments, such as integration PaaS and application PaaS amongst others.
Time to wear a hat. With style.
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Find the full research Tech CEOs’ Guide to Growth in Application Infrastructure and Middleware, 2019 (Warning: you must be a Gartner client to access the document)