InfoWorld: Mark Andreesen Talks Blades, IT Automation

Steering his company from a managed services business model into
unchartered software provider waters, Marc Andreessen, chairman and
co-founder of Opsware, is no stranger to unique challenges. The
former CTO of America Online and CTO of Netscape Communications
recently sat down with InfoWorld Staff Writer Brian Fonseca to
discuss his thoughts on the enablement of IT automation, the rapid
commodity of hardware, and why blade servers are ultimately headed
for the trash bin.

InfoWorld: As customers push for greater ROI as
well as increased infrastructure and resource optimization, what
landscape is being developed?

Andreessen: I characterize things a bit
differently. ROI is not actually all [customers] are interested in.
I think all they’re interested in is cost-cutting because ROI
implies making an investment and getting a return, and that’s
exactly what people aren’t willing to do right now. In general,
what we see happening in talking to customers is that they’re
purely looking to cut costs. I think this is one of the more
interesting times in the last 10 years in terms of the changes that
are taking place because people are really being forced themselves,
and then forcing vendors, to take a very hard look at the cost of
all this stuff, and that’s really not something we’ve done as an
industry.

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