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The soft grid
September 30, 2005
Softricity, a Boston company delivering software applications over the Internet, has put together a nice little film about the transformation of software into a utility service. Check it out.
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Comments
This piece of software will change the business radically if it keeps its promises. Even 85% of them. This solution is definitely worth of testing.
In my opinion the self-service part of it makes a lot of sense in utility computing world. No need to enormous testing phases and pre-installation operations when replacing PC's in large environments. Just one-time testing and publishing in isolated packages. And the final deployment phase done by the end-users, self-service as its best.
Pitfalls of this kind of solution usually are related to in-house developed software packages. Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and other highly used more or less standard packages are easy to deploy, even with Microsoft mechanisms like Active Directory etc.
In-house packages or tailored solutions sometimes have hardcoded connections to databases or network adapters or usernames etc, not to forget cryptic registry entries. (Please, don't ask why, but they do.) Isolated environments where the solution is run could be the answer, and the OS will stay untouched and standard. There is no need to give to the user any administration rights on his or her own PC. More easy to support by the service desks.
Demo of this Softgrid is promising, but all environments needs careful testing and validation. But as mentioned, worth of testing I think.
Posted by: Pertti Mäkitalo at October 1, 2005 12:50 PM
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