How's this for ironic: The next-generation of ISVs (independent software vendors) focused on enterprise customers are... the enterprise customers themselves. Indeed, EMC expects a software development renaissance to occur within corporate enterprises -- as DevOps professionals write and deploy a new generation of customer-facing apps atop converged, virtualized hardware.
A few months before his resignation, former Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz explained the scenario a bit to me during an EMC World 2015 Q&A session. He sees next-generation ISVs as the enterprises themselves (DevOps Pros) working closely with digital services experts and underlying infrastructure providers.
Here's exactly what he said:
The Bigger Picture
Overall EMC and its partner companies (Pivotal, RSA Security VCE and VMware) are betting that enterprises will modernize their infrastructure to a so-called "3.0" design to support modern apps that need to scale on demand. The 1.0 stage was the mainframe; 2.0 was client-server; 2.5 was roughly Internet and web; 3.0 is the modern on-demand world, EMC's leaders said at the conference.
At the same time, EMC and its partner companies are betting that enterprise businesses want to build their own customer-facing applications -- in order to differentiate from rivals.
If those trends play out, I suspect many enterprises will become ISVs and app developers of sorts. But the jury is still out on the variables above.
