{"id":101,"date":"2005-09-21T10:51:46","date_gmt":"2005-09-21T16:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=101"},"modified":"2005-09-21T10:51:46","modified_gmt":"2005-09-21T16:51:46","slug":"the_end_is_nigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"The end is near(er)"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of this year, I wrote an article about utility computing that came to be published in the spring edition of the MIT Sloan Management Review<\/a> under the title The End of Corporate Computing<\/a>. In it, I argued that advances in networking and related technologies like virtualization and web services are going to radically transform the way information technology is supplied to businesses. Companies are going to shift from the traditional, fragmented model of client-server computing, which requires them to buy, assemble and maintain vast quantities of complex and inefficient computing machinery, to a centralized utility model, in which computing assets are rationalized, standardized and consolidated and what we’ve come to call “IT” is supplied over networks as a service from central utility plants. The economic advantages of the utility model are so great, I argued, that the transformation of IT is inevitable.<\/p>\n

When I wrote the piece, I assumed this shift would play out slowly, as the utility model battled against a status quo propped up by the entrenched interests of both suppliers and corporate IT departments. But now I’m not so sure. I may have been thinking too conservatively. In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen, particularly on the software side, growing signs of a sea change. As consolidation, commoditization and weakening demand turn traditional packaged software into a rust-belt industry, dominated by a couple of big suppliers looking to milk the installed base, innovation and growth seem to be shifting quickly to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena. Pushed by diverse utility upstarts like Google (on the consumer side, so far), Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies, 37signals and Rearden Commerce, traditional software makers are now jockeying to position themselves as players in the SaaS world.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, for example, Microsoft put software services at the center of its strategy, or at least very near the center. It announced<\/a> that its diffuse business units would be collapsed into three groups, including a “platform” organization combining the Windows operating systems with the MSN web site. Ray Ozzie will become the company’s services guru, helping to coordinate the shift to a services model across the three groups. “Our goal in making these changes,” explained CEO Steve Ballmer in an email<\/a> to staff, “is to enable Microsoft to achieve greater agility in … executing our software-based services strategy.” It remains to be seen eactly how far and fast Microsoft will go down the services route – and whether it can figure out a services business model that will deliver the kind of rich profits its packaged software has long provided – but the dramatic reorganization<\/a> shows that it recognizes the old model is dying.<\/p>\n

Also yesterday, David Berlind reported on an interesting conversation<\/a> he had with IBM’s Ken Bisconti on the company’s aggressive plans to establish IBM Workplace as what I would call a utility interface<\/a> – a unified access point, or portal, for software services delivered over a network (from either a company’s own servers or those of an outside host). Each user’s portal can be customized with different service “components” depending on the person’s job. “The components can be custom-built components designed to give you access to the parts of a particular business process that your [sic] authorized to have access to, or they can be canned ones such as … OpenOffice.org-derived productivity components” (ie, open-source substitutes for Microsoft Office). Upgrading and maintenance of the components is all done centrally, by the host, rather than locally, at each client machine. Moreover, “users will be able to save their data to the network and, much the same way their portal with all its components follows them everywhere, so too will the storage and everything the user has saved to it.” How well Workplace actually comes to fulfill this vision remains to be seen, but it’s another clear sign of the transformation in software delivery.<\/p>\n

Software applications are, of course, only one side of the utility model. The other side is the infrastructure – the trillions of dollars worth of hardware and system software that companies today maintain privately, within their proprietary data centers. That, too, is an obsolete model, and the shift to a rationalized, “multi-tenant” utility infrastructure will likely entail even more profound changes than the related shift to software-as-a-service. (Yesterday, to add one more data point, Sun CEO Scott McNealy talked about “selling thin clients as a service<\/a>, a display grid at $1 per day.”) It’s on the hardware side, perhaps, that the status quo will prove toughest to displace, though even here I see indications that things may move faster than I originally expected. But more on that later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the start of this year, I wrote an article about utility computing that came to be published in the spring edition of the MIT Sloan Management Review under the title The End of Corporate Computing. In it, I argued that advances in networking and related technologies like virtualization and web services are going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}