Is Innovation Really On The Skids?

摘要

Business technology innovation is dead! Or so we hear. It's easy to take that jaundiced view in a tech economy dominated by vendor consolidation and customer cost cutting. But is innovation really on the skids?rnAmong tech vendors, it's clearly not in the best interests of the giants to slaughter their cash cows and blow up their business models in favor of lighter and cheaper alternatives. Where they've forwarded their own big ideas like "unified computing" and "software plus services," it's been to extend their positions rather than establish wholly new ones.rnFormer Cisco exec Jayshree Ullal, CEO of 10-Gig Ethernet startup Arista Networks, says big tech vendors are "trapped into incre-mentalism." Although Cisco spends $5 billion a year on R&D, it has relied on scores of acquisitions as its main innovation engine. Building a $100 million business from scratch doesn't make much of a difference at a $40 billion-plus company. EMC set out years ago to remake itself as a software company, snapping up top-tier developers like Documentum and VMware. Even so, most of EMC's revenue still comes from storage iron.