Like Sarbanes-Oxley?
Sarbanes-Oxley. I think data protection is one. Security has been one. Disaster recovery is one. Just updating the old infrastructure. I saw a survey recently that says the infrastructure today is the oldest -- in terms of years since it's been (upgraded) -- since 1986... I think that's where money is being spent.
Contrast that with the consumer business. Consumer IT spending -- to the extent it's IT business -- has actually continued to do quite well. And people are pursuing new applications. They're buying music players, they're buying digital cameras. They're putting Wi-Fi in their home. They're doing that stuff.
In the IT space… nothing has emerged to cause people to do what they traditionally did when IT was very successful -- which is to invest in new, fundamental applications. They don't believe yet.
Do you see a closer relationship between the IT part of the business and the business function itself? You see a lot of these buzzwords like utility computing and adaptive enterprise…
Every IT person worth their salt, for the last 10 years, has always worked very hard to make IT a business imperative. Definitely, spending was loose and free, relative to today, but I don't think that changed that particular goal.
I was talking to somebody recently, and they pushed back on me about this "no new applications." They said, "Well, what about adaptive enterprise?" and all these things. I said, "That's all infrastructure stuff." Whatever it is, it's just about getting an infrastructure that's lower cost -- that's all that it is. There's nothing about delivering any new value or any new applications. It's just doing it cheaper.
Do you think that there's a point at which we will see more innovation on the application side? Yeah, there is a relationship -- kind of both ways -- between the application and the infrastructure. Applications drive the need for infrastructure; and good, reliable, low-cost infrastructure facilitates good applications. It's definitely a necessary progression. Everybody is sitting back, waiting for what the big new application is. I frequently think it's the ones we tried to do before, that didn't work well -- I don't think it's necessarily a bunch of fundamentally new things. I think it's things like Web services and tying the supply chain.
