Gentlemen...

``Gentlemen and ladies,'' Alfred began as he stood behind the rostrum under the intense spot light. It was his moment, his hour of triumph. The outline of the company's strategic initiatives, the cumulation of almost a full year of brain-storming and working with his department heads, the fruition of which was this presentaion that he was about to give.

``Gentlemen and ladies, I will being by first congratulating you for the best financial results that we have had in the last five years in which we were in existence as a whole company.'' There was a large applause all round in the auditorium that they had hired for the seminar. Alfred beamed as he eyed the audience, his people, the ones who made the hard achieveable, and the impossible merely difficult.

``These five years have been tough on us all. We survived two major global financial meltdowns, a couple of disruptive technology incursions, and the sudden tightening of the auditing and reporting processes that were put in place to stem the types of collapse that occurred. Despite it all, we have done very well.

``We will not rest on our laurels, however, and it is with great anticipation that I reveal the new five-year workplan that the management team has put together to help steer us through these tumultous times while maintaining our leading edge.''

Thunderous applause flooded the auditorium once more. Alfred was proud of the moment, even though he hadn't actually revealed the plan. He stood there and basked in the joy and enthusiasm, waiting for it to die down before he continued.

``Gentlemen and ladies, do not think of me as being a downer when I say that the greatest challenge that we have to deal with hasn't arrived yet. Do not think of me as being a naysayer when I say that the two financial collapses of the world financial systems and the incursion of the disruptive technologies are merely the tip of the ice-berg. I am merely being pragmatic and speaking enough of the truth so that you will be prepared for the upcoming challenges.

``Times are hard. As a technological company, the easy times are all but over. We need innovation; our craft demands it, our customers require it. This is not like the days of old where we can keep performing incremental adjustments to our software offerings and ship it out to a hungry crowd. Disruptive technology abounds, especially since there is a large increase in the availability of common platforms from which new software may be developed upon. Never forget that five years ago, there was no such thing as the iOS, the Android and everything else in between. We had to write our own platform, provide our own tools, and that was how we became what we are today.

``But the open platforms have disrupted our old workflow. No one is willing to put in money on a platform such as ours---most of the revenue we are getting from that particular aspect of our enterprise comes from the old customers who have already been on our system for so long that it makes almost no sense to try to rewrite all the old code to make them work on the newer and more open platforms. This model can sustain us for perhaps another two to three years, but it is not tenable in the long run. We must innovate.

``But innovation here doesn't mean reinventing the wheel. I don't mean that we have to rewrite everything that we had to use the newer platforms---that is both a waste of resources and a pain in maintenance. Innovation means that we take the open platforms, embrace it, and extend it to beyond what the new user base is even willing to start seeing. In other words, exposing them to an even more vibrant world than what their new platforms can support.''

Alfred paused for a while and looked about him. In the shadow of the darkness, he could see the hundres of faces looking up at him attentively. He smiled to himself; having an attentive audience was already half the battle won.

``If we are not going to rewrite things in the new platform, what does it mean to expose an extended perspective of the new platform to the new users? Simply put, we will adjust our existing platform to make it even more familiar for the new users who are more used to the new platforms, while maintaining good backwards compatibility with our existing client base.

``Which, of course, brings me to the first big change that I would want to introduce. From now on, each department has a specific `extension' group that has one mandate---to take the relevant parts of the open platform and create an emulation layer between that and our own platform's way of doing things. It may sound a little cruel, but the necessity of assimilating disruptive technologies into the folds of our platform is exceedingly important.''

The audience clapped once again, with even more fervour than before. Alfred was glad that it was a welcomed piece of news for the audience; already there has been rumours about how to deal with the disruptive technology, with some going as far as saying that the company was going to go under and be unable to recover. The release of the official word seemed to have abated that resentment, and Alfred could tell that his team was going to achieve even better results in the face of even more adversity.