Anthropic's Model Context Protocol became the connectivity standard everyone wanted. OpenAI adopted it. Microsoft followed. The Linux Foundation took stewardship.
Then enterprises started deploying it.
Organizations moving past demos are hitting an unexpected threshold. When every internal system needs its own MCP server, you haven't eliminated complexity. You've relocated it. Development teams now manage dozens of active servers connecting agents to Slack, databases, internal tools, and proprietary systems. The protocol standardized connectivity. Nobody standardized the operational burden of running all those servers.
January's pattern suggests the next six months will surface a new tooling category: MCP server orchestration, governance, and lifecycle management. The organizations that moved fastest on adoption are becoming test cases for what happens when the standard succeeds.