A quick chat with Nick Carr

[rglauser]

Service-now.com was at the Pink Elephant conference this week. The Tuesday morning keynote was an excellent presentation (no bias here) by Nick Carr, controversial author of "Does IT Matter?" and "The Big Switch". The audience was about 1,000 strong, comprised of mostly IT process and service management professionals.

Matt French and I had a chance to briefly chat with Nick after the keynote. We exchanged a couple of pleasantries about how we are on the same page in regards to IT moving to the cloud, utility and SaaS models.

Then Nick asked us, "How do you think my message was received by this crowd?" He confirmed what I was thinking the during the entire keynote, "This guy has probably made more enemies in the IT industry than anybody else."

In response to his question, we offered up a couple of thoughts. First, the majority of the audience are focused on improving IT process. No technology can replace somebody who knows how to make technology work best with people and business.

Second, many SaaS and cloud offerings these days offer IT pros the ability to continue to build new applications through platform-as-a-service or cloud development environments. For example, many Service-now.com customers are now extending our core IT service management applications to other areas of the business (outside of IT) by quickly building out new applications on our PaaS.

Conference attendees should not have felt threatened by Nick's presentation. If they were, it is their own fault. The principles of SaaS and cloud computing are not new and it is not difficult to find numerous opportunities for IT pros in the new world of on-demand computing.

After our chat, we saw Nick signing "The Big Switch" in the conference bookstore. Judging by the line out the door of people waiting to get a signature, I'd say most attendees agree that cloud computing and its derivatives are a good thing for the industry, and more important, businesses everywhere.