| We all remember the days when checking one's bank account
balance meant a trip to the branch; when placing a phone call
while outdoors meant finding a telephone booth; when buying
goods meant a trip to the store. A few years only (albeit
a millennium border was crossed!), and we no longer care about
some store's business hours, the location of a phone booth
or a bank branch.
We have come to not only enjoy, but to expect and depend
on services being available to us, wherever and whenever
we need them. Internet and e-business are no longer buzzwords,
but part of daily reality for tens of millions of people.
Similar requirements shape the way businesses and organizations
function, and things will not stop here. Every day we hear
more about grid computing, utility computing, autonomic
computing…What's going on?
A new paradigm
There is a new paradigm for delivering/using computing power
utility-style, but it is more than that: it is a new paradigm
for conducting business. This new concept is prompted as
a survival strategy for a world defined by an ever-increasing
step of change and complexity.
If IBM is right, we are on the cusp of a new era in computer
technology and business: the era of "e-business on
demand". In late October, in New York, in front of
several hundred of their biggest clients, Sam Palmisano,
IBM's President and CEO, has unveiled the company's US$10
billion initiative in support of "e-business on demand",
Big Blue's new strategic initiative.
Others in the IT arena also have initiatives related to
this new concept. Sun has the N1 network architecture and
IForce partner programs as a way to integrate complex, heterogeneous
systems - operating systems, servers, microprocessors, storage,
application environments and programming languages. Hewlett-Packard
is pilot testing its utility data center (UDC) platform,
a flexible, cost-effective solution that automatically reassigns
resources in response to changing business and IT requirements.
The vision
For IBM, "e-business on demand" is the next phase
of e-business: companies and organizations will move beyond
integrating their various processes as they will need to
sense and respond to fluctuating market conditions in real
time. They will have to adjust their way of doing business
along the following directions:
- Responsiveness: adapting quickly to the dynamic and
often unpredictable changes in demand for a company's
products or services, availability of supplies, market
trends, consumer behaviour and competition developments
- Variability: being flexible in terms of costs and processes.
This is the internal, organizational facet of responsiveness;
the set of practices and mechanisms that a business needs
to deploy in order to be responsive.
- Focus: the ability to understand and sustain one's core
competencies and differences within the market. This is
the leadership facet of responsiveness.
- Resiliency: managing changes and threats in a reliable
and secure manner. Events ranging from force-majuere or
man-made catastrophe to power spikes have become more
and more part of what businesses have to confront. This
is the operational facet of responsiveness.
The on-demand environment
How can this type of business be sustained? What kind of
technological infrastructure does it require?
Not today's collection of largely dis-integrated and under-used
components. Enterprises will become more and more "part
of the net", rather than just being on the net, and
this process has already started. In IBM's vision, the on-demand
business needs an on-demand environment that will very much
behave like a utility service. In order to be successful,
the on-demand environment will have to be:
- Integrated: core processes - not mere computers - will
have to work seamlessly. Based on a new software infrastructure
characterized by horizontal integration, the servers,
middleware, and all sorts of user devices will be completely
transparent to applications of this integrated environment.
- Virtualized: using the dormant capacity of servers
and PC's (notorious for their low percentage of actual
CPU usage) will result in virtually unlimited computing
capacity, available to business processes - this is the
computing grid.
- Open: all technologies will be able to work together.
This is the era of open standards and architectures: Linux,
XML, Java and Web services.
- Autonomous: the complexity of this infrastructure will
require a new method of management and support, very much
like how living organisms self-manage their physiological
functions. The infrastructure components will have the
ability to autonomously detect, fix and manage problems
in their own "body", with no human intervention,
and without affecting the functions that support business
processes.
For IBM, "e-business on demand" is the corollary
of years of strategic planning and execution. For the IT
industry at large, it could be a much needed impulse to
get it out of its recent market slumps. IBM is poised to
lead this move. But, as Palmisano emphasized, the biggest
challenge of "e-business on demand" is not technology,
it's the shift that has to happen in the minds of those
at the helm of businesses and organizations worldwide. They
have to understand, and then act upon, the enormous potential
value that "e-business on-demand" will provide.
Tatiana Andronache is IT technical staff
for a large information technology company in Toronto, Canada.
She can be reached at tatiana.andronache@sympatico.ca
|
