As a leap back in time for me, I wanted to start a new with an old friend, the movie quote. When I re-read my take from a few years ago on Servers, Serendipidy and Superman it seemed like a great idea to draw some parallels between the past and the future with another movie classic.
There is a scene in the 1985 film Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox, playing the youthful protagonist Marty McFly, delivers a memorable quote. Surrounded by dry ice in the barren car park of a JC Penney, he confronts the paradox of a future-defining creation being constructed from unreliable materials, and in that moment, utters a line that might just encapsulate a profound truth about innovation:
“Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?”
The DeLorean Principle of Innovation
The line speaks of course to the eccentric genius of Doc Brown but also to the very essence of disruptive innovation…the audacious reimagining of the familiar, or some might say classicly unreliable, into something utterly transformative. You might be wondering how this box office hit relates to the intricate world of IT services, particularly as we stand at the precipice of the AI and Quantum age. Let’s delve into the idea that, much like a DeLorean, our existing IT infrastructures are being called upon to house engines of progress that defy conventional expectation. The question is no longer if these technologies will integrate, but how our existing IT services will evolve to not just accommodate, but actively enable their staggering potential.
Legacy IT as the Launchpad
Some might view legacy IT infrastructure as akin to the unassuming chassis of a DeLorean, a functional, perhaps a little iconic, but fundamentally earthbound steel framed vehicle. Yet, as we navigate the choppy seas of digital transformation, we are witnessing a spectacular convergence. The very data centres, cloud platforms, and network architectures that underpin today’s enterprise are becoming the unexpected hosts for the engines of artificial intelligence and the nascent, yet potent, power of quantum computing. It’s a journey of retrofitting, of re-architecting, and fundamentally, of redefining the very fabric of what constitutes an ‘IT service’.
AI Powers the Flux Capacitor
If the DeLorean’s stainless steel body represents our contemporary IT landscape, then Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly the ‘flux capacitor’, whether the sequenced incandecent bulbs of the movie prop lighting represent the ‘predict next word’ fundamental of LLMs or 88 miles per hour holds the key to AGI (artificial general intelligence) we will have to discover ourselves.
AI is not just a new application to run on our servers, it is becoming the very intelligence embedded within the servers themselves, transforming static infrastructure into dynamic, self-optimising ecosystems. Consider the shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive anomaly detection, from manual scaling to AI-driven elastic environments, or the burgeoning field of AIOps. But the real leap forward is happening through the emergence of agentic flows, systems where autonomous agents collaborate, negotiate, and adapt in real time. These flows are increasingly orchestrated using frameworks like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardises how agents share context and intent and is rapidly becoming the must-have feature of any software service even loosely claiming agentic capability, and Google’s A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol, which enables a common JSON structured way to discover and facilitate between intelligent agents across platforms.
With the perceived abundance of computational power, the cost-to-iterate has become so low that the burden moves to considering the quality of the question to ask, rather than the cost to achieve a viable answer to a badly written request.
Quantum Computing as Digital Plutonium
And then there is Quantum computing, perhaps the ‘plutonium’ that promises to unlock temporal shifts in computational capability, moving beyond the binary constraints that have governed computing for decades. The implications for IT services are profound, from revolutionising cryptography and data security to accelerating complex simulations for drug discovery, materials science, and financial modelling. While still in its nascent stages, it feels very close and the integration of quantum capabilities, whether through cloud-based quantum services or hybrid classical-quantum architectures, demands a reimagining of our IT service delivery models. It poses fundamental questions about data preparation, algorithmic design, and the very interfaces through which we interact with computational power. How do we ensure that the rush to get to the current imagining of quantum operations doesn’t consume resources without delivering proportional and safe value? The responsibility for the efficient use of these cutting-edge resources needs to be shared, and directed to a right-computation model, a ‘compute broker’ that can coordinate the use of these resources, not just between providers and consumers, but within the very design of our intelligent, agentic, and quantum-ready IT services.
So, in returning to our iconic cinematic moment, the question raised by Marty highlights a core principle of innovation in that the truly revolutionary often emerges from the unexpected, the unconventional, and the seemingly impossible marriage of existing elements with visionary ambition. The IT services landscape is no longer just about keeping the lights on; it’s about harnessing the ‘flux capacitor’ of AI, the ‘plutonium’ of Quantum, and the connective tissue of protocols like MCP and A2A to build time machines that propel businesses into new dimensions of possibility. Just as Lex Luthor, in Superman, saw the secrets of the universe in a chewing gum wrapper, we must learn to see beyond the perceived limitations of current IT infrastructure and unlock the transformative power that AI, agentic flows, and Quantum technologies promise. We must not only embrace these ‘future’ technologies but skillfully integrate them ‘back’ into our existing IT services, ensuring that the journey is efficient, secure, and ultimately, benefical for humanity as a whole.
The opportunity here is phenomenal, as many of these agents are yet to be conceived. We start again building the foundations of a new workforce, fundementally an off-cortex model of delivering IT services.
The challenge, as always, lies in seeing beyond the components to the potential that lies within.
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