Year end is always time for either year in review style articles or predictions for the upcoming year. Instead, as the clock inexorably marches on, I wanted to give a shout out to some old school technology. While it’s my job as a venture capitalist to spend time thinking about new disruptive technologies, it is fascinating to think about the venerable older technologies that are still enterprise workhorses and the tremendous amount of inertia start-ups must overcome to displace them.
I got thinking about this because I was recently on a panel where someone pointed out that a large portion of server revenue is in alternative Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) i.e. anything non-x86 such as Power, IA-64/Itamium, SPARC, etc. This seemed like an interesting factoid so I looked into the data, which is indeed shocking. Although non-x86 serves, which I categorized as Everything Else in the chart below account for 1.8 percent of the volume of units, they are over 28 percent of the revenue in 2012!
To read the original article: There’s still money in old-school tech, and maybe a lesson for startups too — Cloud Computing News
