| May 14, 2014

2 MIN READ

API and Microservices

Does your organisation want to be an Elephant or a Cheetah?

An elephant, though carries massive strength, the same massive size and its huge body weight makes the elephant difficult to move about with ease or change courses of its direction swiftly. Compare that to a cheetah. They are the fastest land mammals averaging at a speed of 120 km/h. Their shape, agility and the fact that they have strong muscular legs, help them achieve those speeds very easily.
To me, an elephant represents a rigid organisation – one who has a massive size, scale of operations, well-defined process, standards, compliance norms, but very difficult to move, very difficult to change the direction under changing environments- whereas, a cheetah represents a completely flexible organisation – the organisation which can adapt to changing business needs in all aspects, and adopt news directions, new techniques to cope up with these changing needs.
When I gave this Elephant-Cheetah analogy in one of the panel discussions, two of my panellist friends – executives from big telecommunication companies in ASEAN- came forward and admitted that their organisations have become more like an elephant, though they want to make them like a cheetah.
When I talk to customers in this region, many of them do mention the same problem. These are the companies established in 70s-80s, may be before that. They have massive scale of operations, and turnover, no doubt. But now when they see their business needs changing, customer behaviours changing because of social and mobile revolution, the baggage of the old IT infrastructure, proprietary technologies and processes is not allowing them to adapt in this hurricane of changes and adopt the newer technologies.
Open source technologies like Linux, Postgres, MongoDB, NGINX provide such companies the flexibility that they are looking for. “Open” in open source is not just about the source, but it is about freedom of choice, efficiency, flexibility and ultimately realising the cost benefits. It is about unlocking organisations from vendor tyrannies. Ultimately it is about an evolutionary way to reducing costs and risks by being in control of your innovations.
We allow our clients to get rid of their IT rigidity and bring the flexibility of innovation to them. We allow our customers to transform themselves from an Elephant to a Cheetah while still allowing to scale up their operations like an elephant. Are you ready for it? Where is your rigidity? Is it really in your IT or in the mind-set?

– Kaustubh Patwardhan, Director I Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Ashnik

Read other articles in the Newsletter:
Business has changed, design approach needs to change as well – Sachin Dabir
Guest Article: Overcoming the Costs of Oracle Migrations – Sandor Klein, VP – EDB
What I learnt as a PostgreSQL Trainer – Sameer Kumar


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