Cranking up corporate clock speeds
Published: 11 Dec 2003 11:55 GMT
Utility Computing
Again, there's a lot of neo-philosophical positioning going on, with things like HP's Adaptive Enterprise and IBM's On Demand; and clearly we're years off IT being supplied like gas or electricity or sold as a service, despite what we hear about Grid and Blade/Brick approaches. But clearly this is the way the industry wants to move, at least at the level of strategy of the IBMs and Microsofts. Even if self-healing and autonomic processes sound straight out of science fiction, we will get there. Anything that promotes flexibility and scaling up (or out) as needed will win hearts and minds in the RTE-shaped future
Virtualisation
Be it storage virtualisation (at the fabric, server, or disk level) or any middleware that helps abstract physical kit from business use, virtualisation is a key RTE component. On the middleware front, message-oriented middleware is set for a huge revival -- because anything that can swiftly communicate at an event-based level will be of increasing interest for companies seeking to compress decision times
Collaboration and Information Sharing
It may seem obvious, but none of this heavy metal technology will be any more use than a chocolate teapot unless users can get a handle on all that information. Remember when we thought email would speed up decision making? Expect receptive ears if you talk about corporate instant messaging to help de-clog the emailed-up communication arteries, plus lots more business use of 2.5G level technologies (think about how useful an MMS of your dented wing mirror could be for, say, insurance claims processing)
That list may seem like the entire IT shop -- but the point is that the thrust of modern information technology, if it really is ever going to get out of recession, must be to offer business achievable benefits. Cutting time to market and achieving real-time business speeds has to be the major prize.
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