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The promise of reinvigorating the economy through strategic government investment is appealing.  Obama’s economic recovery plan is deeply rooted in leveraging technology; there hasn’t been this much talk about driving technology adoption since Al Gore.   The plan put forth by Obama’s team centers on two main themes:  green our economy and redefine our industries by integrating them.  Upgrading schools and hospitals to be more energy efficient means more than just changing to those curly-q light bulbs; it means retrofitting and building with low- to zero-carbon emission drywall and windows.  And that same technology is needed in the national infrastructure overhaul.  This theme will drive a new wave of innovation across a number of sectors in our economy.  On the second theme, the boundaries around and between businesses, customers and partners have been melting for some time.  Not because of globalization but because the velocity and volatility of the global economy demands organizational processes and systems that can predict, manage and respond to co-opetition while sustaining customer delight and new sources of revenue.  This theme will fuel not only the expansion of internet infrastructure but will also drive innovation in the systems and applications needed to effectively ‘bind’ companies together into a new generation of digital keiretsu networks.

Both themes depend on technology and lots of it. What kind of technology?  The industrial strength enterprise kind - software applications, systems management, hardware and communications – used to perform complex modeling, resource-based management, customer management, and security. More importantly, this will drive new innovation and force out current inefficiencies in data center infrastructures.  The data center needs to be far less complex in order to meet the needs of the fast-moving, interconnected, digital economy.   And we need this new economy to take hold so that we can grow out of our current situation.  Today’s high levels of data center complexity comes from physical and virtual machines being managed differently, piecemeal-fashion disaster recovery, absence of standards to enable true heterogeneity interoperability, and the lack of integrated holistic frameworks for managing the whole data center, to name just a few.   Data centers are rapidly coming to the conclusion that they can’t stand still, virtualization-only solutions add to complexity, and buying more pizza boxes isn’t the answer.  Infrastructure orchestration solutions, like PAN Manager Software by Egenera, based on logical abstractions of all data center assets enable easy and automated provisioning and management of physical and virtual assets deliver the foundational step in reducing complexity and increasing agility, responsiveness and reliability.

The quest to capitalize on the new digital economy will see new ways of solving new and old problems.   And we should see rapid maturation of emerging technologies and their business models like cloud computing.   And that means jobs.  According to the Business Software Alliance, we could see a 10 percent increase in technology jobs if Obama can operationalize his plan early in the term.  But only if the economic recovery plan is funded and companies proactively act on streamlining their data center to get ready for the new digital age economy.