We live in a world today where almost everything is available as a service.

Don't want to wash your own clothes? There are plenty of places that will do that for you. Want to have 24×7 access to cars without actually owning one? Zipcar is for you. Don't want to have to drive at all? An Uber driver is one click away. Want to have someone else do your grocery shopping? Instacart can help.

Tivix harnesses all kinds of things-as-a-service today. We can spin-up and configure hosting infracture on AWS in a matter of minutes — the kind of hosting infrastructure that once cost millions of dollars, several months, and a dedicated team. We don't have to spend time developing complex payment processing functionality for our clients today — we can integrate Stripe or Braintree quickly and efficiently. Even maintaining our own source code repo/versioning system is unnecessary today, thanks to GitHub.

The huge benefit here is that everyone gains the advantages of scale, regardless of size. Tivix is a small company, running on the infrastucture coat tails of companies with huge scale. A generation ago, that would have been impossible.

What makes this exciting to me is that we can spend all our energy focused on what clients want: solving actual business problems. Our team can work on the hard stuff, while configuring outside services to handle the menial stuff, and our clients benefit from that economic leverage. The "everything-as-a-service" world of 2014 is a game-changer.

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For follow-up read this excellent piece by Sam Gerstenzang at Andreessen Horowitz.