Marc Andreessen, internet wunderkind of Netscape fame who deserves credit for making web geekery cool, famously claimed in 2011 that "software is eating the world." He cited that in a decade, the cost of delivering internet-scale web services has decreased two orders of magnitude and continues to fall.
The future of technology - no, the future of globalization - is now controlled by a small number of application creators. They define the architectures, interfaces, and experiences that transform industries and define how we relate to the world. At ServiceNow, we celebrate them, connect them, enable them. We're proud of our role and even more proud of their accomplishments.
To help quantify the impact they're having, we're re-launching the Index of PaaS Activity (IPA) as the Application Creation Index (ACI). The shift is less a change in name and more a change in philosophy that reflects how customers use our platform.
Customers like RedHat, Land O'Lakes, and Tommy Bahama inspire us with stories about how they're fundamentally changing the nature of service delivery by empowering small teams with great app dev tools. The new name recognizes that the value application creators deliver isn't derived from the cloud services they consume but from their innovation - and the value metric for innovation is apps.
We'll calculate the index based on a weighted average of objective industry criteria that track the app dev movement. We'll take into account publicly-available data like stock prices, social media activity, and job postings plus our own data about custom application volume, trends, and usage patterns.
The index begins January with a score of 100. It will ebb and flow over time and we'll do our best to explain significant shifts as they happen. We'll always invite feedback, particularly insights that challenge our assumptions and conclusions.
In 2013, enterprise software re-emerged as the epicenter of technology innovation. In 2014, as an industry we'll finally acknowledge that application creators deserve the credit. Above all, we realize PaaS is passé, controlled by platform operators tasked with KTLO activities. By contrast, application creation is vibrant, controlled by doers defining the future of enterprise computing.
Software is eating the world. And we're hungrier than ever.
