Preparing for the end of IT as we know it

THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE ENTERPRISE TO EXIT THE DATACENTER

The days of customized applications, inefficient datacenters, large power bills, and a fruitless attempt to satisfy the limitless demand for an increasingly mobile workforce must evolve.
The current model simply isn't sustainable. Mother Nature hates inefficiencies, and most IT environments today are full of them. Applications are too complex and too expensive to maintain. Datacenters and servers run at only a fraction of their total capacity — unless there is a sudden spike in demand or month-end processing. All of this adds up to spiraling energy costs thanks to a new generation of IT-savvy consumers who expect service levels that drive most CIOs crazy.IT won't disappear immediately, but the IT department of tomorrow must find a creative way to face these challenges.
Trying to solve them with the same old thinking is a recipe for frustration and failure. we need to think differently — by anticipating and planning for where the industry and our customers are headed. IT Collapses Under Multiple PressuresThanks to the increasing mobility of technology, people no longer go to work — they connect with work, regardless of where they're located. When you took a job five years ago, you'd expect to get a desktop loaded with a suite of applications on your first day at work. Today people walk into a job and expect to have transparent mobility to all of their applications. Tomorrow, employees won't need to come to work at all — instead they'll access applications via the Internet, iPods, PDAs and cell phones. The traditional office has given way to a mobile workforce no longer tethered to a specific location. Whether it's online banking, shopping, or downloading music, the consumer technologies that people use have set a standard for the availability of enterprise applications that many people now expect from their IT departments.
These increased expectations put a great deal of pressure on the old IT shop, where CIOs need to come up with the capacity to make applications and services accessible from growing numbers of devices. That's why many CIOs now feel that it's become nearly impossible to satisfy the growing demands for these services. Most of them require more servers and datacenter space — both in short supply — and there seems to be no end in sight. Building larger and larger datacenters is a short-term and short-sighted answer, as these places consume so much power that their electricity bills will soon eclipse the cost of hardware.In addition to being increasingly less sustainable on a financial level, pumping out more CO2 puts a strain on our environment as well. Some companies have strong reputations for being environmentally responsible with highly efficient hardware and virtualization solutions. But none of us in the IT industry can deny that building more datacenters is unsustainable, to say nothing of being environmentally irresponsible. For all of these reasons, our current IT operational model, which relies on the corporate datacenter, is unlikely to be viable in the future. Yet we need to have both access to business applications and services without breaking the bank — both financially and environmentally.The New Service Provider ModelThe economies of scale make the traditional enterprise datacenter an inefficient means of supplying business applications and services to our increasingly mobile end users.
There are good reasons why most families don't own switchboards, power generators, or reservoirs. The telecommunications, electricity, and water industries have gone through the same evolution we suggest for IT by achieving a level of standardization and scale that provides safe, reliable, and cost-effective services to your family.Similarly, an increasing number of enterprise applications are now being served up over the Internet instead of through intranets and private networks. For example, you can have easy access to mail and calendar functions from the public Internet as a secure service. This is a big change from a few years ago when it was impossible to get email without going through multiple steps to log into our private network. This relieves our own datacenters of some pressures, while maximizing employee productivity through rapid access to applications. And here lies a tremendous opportunity: Instead of spending our energies on datacenters, why not concentrate on providing safe, secure, and reliable network-based services that run on the public Internet? Why not buy these services from trusted suppliers as opposed to building applications that are expensive to maintain? Do we really believe that each and every business is so unique that standard services like mail, calendaring, IM, HR, and even ERP can't be provisioned from a service provider? But let's make it clear that we're not simply talking about datacenter outsourcing or outhosting. We're talking about turning off applications and shutting down network and datacenters and instead buying services from trusted partners.I believe that in the future, CIOs will provision these services from a community of service providers who will run their own extremely large datacenters in much the same manner as power companies operate power plants today. These companies will provide safe, reliable service over the public Internet. With their scale, these service providers will be able to optimize what we call data plants by virtualizing applications and dynamically allocating compute and storage resources as needed — squeezing every nickel of efficiency out of their equipment in a way that today's CIOs simply can never hope to achieve. The cost savings and efficiency gains will be significant. Instead of deployment times being measured in months for enterprise applications, it will take only a few days — or even hours — for companies to leverage standard services. In this model, it is also reasonable to imagine these applications being as easy to purchase and download as your favorite music files.

FOUR ELEMENTS ARE CRITICAL TO THIS TRANSITION

There are four elements to our strategy of getting out of the old-fashioned datacenter: mobility, security and privacy, trust, and market availability. Mobility, as We've mentioned, is now an essential part of doing business. After getting employees accustomed to having remote access to technology that makes them more productive, asking everyone to turn in their laptops and sit back down at desks just isn't going to work. In the first place, where would we seat everyone? Many of us work in multiple locations, and we foresee the need to have even more applications, voice services, and datacenter information made accessible regardless of where we happen to be.Accessibility in the enterprise needs to be tempered with security and privacy. Simply put, you can't have security without privacy. Now, I'll concede that addressing privacy and security concerns is a critical component to the success of this new IT model. But just as consumers now trust service providers more than ever before, I believe that enterprises will also increasingly trust the new providers of applications and services.For some, trust is a hurdle that is difficult to overcome. Many people still refuse to do their banking online. But it's not only latter-day Luddites who are wary of the coming model of IT. CIOs in some industries understand the pressures on the traditional datacenter, but flatly tell me they simply cannot imagine depending on service providers to manage business applications. I believe adoption of this model is only a matter of time. Do we really believe this trend will remain limited to the consumer sector? Each of the elements I've mentioned depends, of course, on market availability of Internet-based enterprise applications and services.

THE FUTURE IT ENVIRONMENT WILL CHANGE RADICALLY

But what do all these changes mean to people in the IT department? If they're not writing applications or managing datacenters and networks, what's left? I believe IT organizations will become the aggregators of these secure network services. For example, instead of installing or even writing your own ERP applications, IT would aggregate the requirements and provision the ERP service from a trusted partner — and then manage the delivery of that service according to SLAs.To use another example, your family doctor no longer specializes in every conceivable medical condition. Instead, he or she often provides an initial diagnosis, then refers you to a community of safe, reliable service providers with the expertise required to address your specific condition. Understandably, this scenario makes a lot of technology people nervous. I certainly understand the apprehension with which CIOs and IT staff react to these ideas. Many will view this as a threat to their careers, but I would suggest just the opposite. First, for those interested in a "traditional" IT career, don't worry, these jobs will be around for quite a long time. After all, many people thought COBOL would die a horrible death long before Y2K. So if you want to write applications or manage datacenters and networks, these jobs will exist for some time. However, these positions won't be persistent in the progressive companies that see this industry transformation as an opportunity to rethink IT.For those IT professionals who want to be a part of making IT more responsive and delivering real business value, I recommend embracing these changes. Rather than resist these developments, it makes more sense to retool with the skills that will meet the evolving role of IT. It's advice I think many CIOs can use, too. Getting away from datacenters and traditional IT will ultimately help your enterprise be more responsive and responsible.I know that some will find this vision of IT alarming. Don't think this is possible? Ask yourself the following question: If you were starting your own company today and needed ERP services, would you build your own datacenters, buy dozens or even hundreds of servers, and hire your own IT staff — or would you buy ERP services? Think about it. This option is currently available for many applications, as the success of Salesforce.com, Oracle on Demand, and many others attests. These companies are simply incarnations of tomorrow's service providers.The future of secure, network services isn't a question of IF but instead a question of WHEN.We kindly invite you to post your comments, share your vision about the future of IT and describe the challenges your company is facing.

Mario Palavecino
www.nextcomm.com.ar

Offshore Software Development Success

With the maturity of information and communication technologies, offshore development of software by outsourcers is a new trend for reshaping IT strategy around the globe. Technological advances have increased the interconnection between different societies, facilitating a continuous software development cycle or follow-the-sun approach by having team members located in different geographical settings. Software development is an iterative process, in which knowledge builds with the progression of software development work and requires an ongoing awareness by team members of all the changing definitions and relationships in the development effort. This poses a bigger challenge in a global environment as the software development processes happen in a dynamic and distributed setting.

As reported by Beck (2002), “Gartner projects that nearly half of Fortune 1000 global enterprises will choose not to own their IT assets, but instead will derive business benefits from shared IT utility infrastructures owned and operated by service providers hybrids”.
Furthermore, technological advances have increased the interconnection between different societies, facilitating a continuous software development cycle or follow-the-sun approach by having team members located in different geographical settings.


Minimizing costs, not quality

If you are looking to minimize costs without compromising on the quality of services then offshore outsourcing is the best option for you. Offshore Software Development will help you cut application development and maintenance costs and deal effectively with the fluctuations in software demands.

You can outsource your entire Software related services from design through development to testing or get a part of the system developed in case you don’t have the technical know-how for it.

Besides the cost savings, the other advantages offered by offshore website development are the use of skilled and highly qualified IT professionals to develop applications. Outsourcing to countries like Argentina gives you access to outsourcing facilities that excel in applications like E-commerce, Business Process re-engineering, System Migration, Maintaining Legacy system, System integration etc.

Quality is one of the most important factors to be considered while considering Offshore Software Development. The Argentinian companies involved in IT outsourcing in Argentina provide high quality work, meeting international standards and complying with the ISO & SEI-CMM standards.