Vijay Ganti
Published May 26, 2016
Dinosaur Myth Debunked
Dinosaurs have been given a bad name by the mainstream media. It is a common myth that dinosaurs died because they failed to adapt. The truth is that the dinosaurs survived and are in fact thriving with 10,000 species, making them the most diverse of all the four-limbed animals on the planet today. We now know them as birds. Dinosaurs that didn’t adapt died but that is the boring part of the story. The more insightful & interesting story is that the dinosaurs that adapted actually shrunk in size because they wanted to fly. This is one the most interesting pieces of scientific work in evolutionary biology that is not as well known.
In fact, dinosaurs were small in the beginning weighing around 40 lbs and then over several million years of evolution some of them grew to a massive 200,000 lbs. The exception were the Maniraptorans (remember Velociraptor from Jurassic Park), which continued to evolve into bigger and smaller species. The Maniraptorans that grew smaller, traded size for agility - survived and in fact soared high into the skies. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Cloud Connection
Salesforce has said that they want to use Amazon’s infrastructure to increase the pace of their expansion to international markets and will pay $400 M over 4 years to Amazon. Salesforce is the largest enterprise SaaS company in terms of scale out there. If there is any enterprise SaaS business that could justify the cost of running their own infrastructure it’d have to be Salesforce. But they have decided not to because it slows them down. They know that running infrastructure is hard and complex.The advantage some of the Cloud Providers have in this area is huge. So they have traded size for agility.
Business agility is the single biggest predictor of success today for businesses of any size. The ability to service the customer with right products, at the right price, with the right cost structure is an iterative learning exercise because things are changing faster than they ever have. Optimizing for any other factor in the business is a strategic mistake for even the largest enterprise SaaS businesses out there. If you are optimizing for anything else other than agility and have growth ambitions then you may have picked two goals that are mutually exclusive.
Business agility is not engineering agility. Business agility is not doing a lot of things very fast. Engineering agility is the ability to move hands or feet very fast. Business agility is the ability to know which direction to move, move in any direction, change directions, pick up the pace or slow down as quickly as possible. Business agility is the ability to fly.
Dinosaurs will probably survive in our story as well but they just might transform themselves to birds by trading size for agility.
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