Software Is Incomplete Without Hardware

In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously stated Why Software Is Eating The World and I completely agree with him on how software continues to disrupt many industries. From edge devices to public cloud technologies, we have seen software change the economics and in many instances obsoleted traditional and legacy companies. So no question - software is a game changer! However I have ran product management for both hardware and software products and am of the opinion that each can deliver value independently but together the value proposition becomes immensely strong. Today, we announced a new hardware product called the JACE 8000 which runs our next generation Internet of Things (IoT) software Niagara 4. While our software is great, independently available and delivers huge value throughout our delivery chain on its own, we also get significant benefits from having the JACE 8000 hardware bundled and optimized for Niagara. When I say optimized, it is from every aspect i.e. from installation, configuration performance, usability and day to day operations. 

I agree software is eating the world but it is still very hungry without the right hardware. We have seen that happening quite a bit specially in the past 7-8 years in both consumer and enterprise world.

For instance, iPhone wouldn't be so great if it didn't have the cool multi-touch technology behind it or the scratch resistant glossy screen that we all fell in love. Same is true for any new device with wifi or bluetooth chipset in it. However these technologies need software utilities to make the end product simple to use with added value. Microsoft which has traditionally been a software leader has embraced and launched hardware products in recent years including Microsoft Surface & Xbox which run their software. In fact, Microsoft's homepage looks more like a hardware company than a pure software player. Below is a snapshot from earlier today.

In the enterprise IT world, we saw the emergence of bundled security appliances from many established ISVs who would load their software on hardware devices and make it super simple for end users to install and operate. The hardware in many of these appliances were customized - from look and feel to performance, network bandwidth etc to ensure their software runs the best on selected hardware.

The introduction of Converged Infrastructure products such as vBlock from VCE (EMC owned) also provided a very simple value prop i.e. these are private cloud building blocks that are easy to set up, configure and operate due to the software stack that is running on the system. But the software is valuable as underlying storage and compute power is right there available on the Converged Infrastructure offering.

In IoT, we will increasingly see the software and hardware ecosystem evolve and become inseparable - from sensors all the way to cloud. By no means I am advocating that software is not a game changer - quite the contrary specially as I am personally heavily involved with IoT software framework(s) and cloud technologies. My point is the best software in the world will also need to reside on a nice piece of hardware to deliver long term sustained value to customers. And as technology providers regardless of whether we're dealing with software or hardware, we need to think what impacts customers holistically than thinking in silos.

About the Author

Pranay Prakash is the Vice president of Product Management/Marketing at Tridium at Honeywell responsible for M2M and IoT software and hardware products. Pranay joined Honeywell from Dell where most recently he was the Senior Director of Product Management for Data Center and Virtualization Solutions, responsible for Dell's Converged Infrastructure and Virtual Integrated System (VIS) Private and Hybrid Cloud product portfolio. An experienced marketing leader, Prakash has held executive and senior management positions within the high tech industry in Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia, including NEC Corporation of America, NCS Technologies Inc and Berkeley Software Design Inc with primary focus on Open Source FreeBSD and Linux Operating Systems, Servers, OEM appliances and data center technologies. Pranay is extremely passionate about cloud and is focused heavily on making Internet of Things (IoT) a reality. He believes cloud has become a lot bigger and moved beyond traditional IT devices. He is also a Cisco Champion for IoT for the second consecutive year.

Connect with Pranay at: Twitter: @prakash_pranayhttps://twitter.com/prakash_pranay;  LinkedIn:http://www.garudax.id/pub/pranay-prakash/0/542/717