Software Eats Everything

A widely quoted phrase these days is “software eats everything.” It refers to the great value that software delivers. I believe it also applies to the profound impact it’s making in the services world. Software is disintermediating the industrialized labor arbitrage model and also infrastructure services. Let’s look at the huge implications for the services industry.

How is software eating services? It’s happening in a number of important ways and areas.

Software eating BPO

First, software enables automation and RPA to replace much of what the current industrialized arbitrage model does. Much of this work is repetitive and screams for a more automated approach. BPO work, for instance, bridges the gap between the labor that interfaces between records and the system of records. As I’ve blogged before, software is about to eat BPO labor.

DevOps and software eating infrastructure services

The DevOps revolution’s impact on infrastructure services is another example of software eating everything. A fully integrated DevOps platform allows defining code for infrastructure hardware at the same time as defining code for functionality. Increasingly in a software-defined infrastructure, companies can build an integrated DevOps platform that enables simultaneously configuring the entire supply chain from functionality all the way down to the number of cores it requires to run and test it.

Prior to the DevOps movement, all these steps were labor based, and much of this work migrated into the industrialized arbitrage model. They now become largely automated and software controlled.

Software and virtual services eating infrastructure services

Another example within infrastructure is the infrastructure itself. Five years ago, companies operated in a world where they were trying to move from 20 servers per FTE to 50. Most of the infrastructure service providers succeeded based upon their ability to make that shift.

Today, the services industry tries to get up to somewhere in the range of 200 to 500 FTEs per server. But the highly automated world in Silicon Valley has over 100,000 virtual servers per person. They’ve completely severed the link between people and servers. Again, a dramatic example of software eating everything.

SaaS, BPaaS impact

Another dramatic example of software eating everything is the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) offerings. These software-based services offerings completely automate and configure the software, hardware, and business process experience for customers. SaaS and BPaaS completely upend the classic functional model previously used to deliver these functions.

Implications for the service industry

Software eating everything is a relentless focus on different ways to sever the traditional link of labor (FTEs) to service. The dislocation to labor-based businesses will be immense over the next few years as this journey to a software-defined world continues and existing business models struggle to adapt.

A software-defined marketplace will dramatically change the current services market. It will create opportunities for new industries to emerge and force tremendous tension on the incumbent service providers to survive by embracing the change and cannibalizing their existing work.


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