The View From Here: May 28, 2008

February 4, 2008

Any IT or finance executive who thinks that the decision-making process is going to get easier is in denial. That, however, is the bad news. The good news is that the emerging options can revolutionize their business.

This InformationWeek story from earlier this month offers a terrific example of how technology is completely changing organizations’ fates. Note that the operative word is “will,” not “may.” Organizations not exploring the potential changes – in this case, the move from legacy to some form of thin client/virtualized computing – undoubtedly compete with companies that will take advantage of the new approaches. Thus, even companies blindly staying with legacy technologies are impacted, since their competitors will have changed (and most likely improved) their computing resources.

The article is very interesting. The bottom line is that the old model of maintaining a stable of desktop and mobile devices, each outfitted with a discreet operating system and menu of applications, is changing.

The InformationWeek story describes more than one emerging model. They general environment is characterized by a mix of older thin client technologies (in which the heavy computing lifting is done at the data center) and far newer virtualization and software-as-a-service approaches. Virtualization separates the operating system from the physical machine, enabling multiple OSes to run on a chassis. SaaS is the downloading of applications from the Web on an as-needed basis.

How to architect the computing infrastructure is only one example (albeit a big one) of how radically things are changing. The short version is that the flexibility available to organizations is growing as fast as the price of gas. IT departments, of course, are charged with implementing these new approaches. Figuring out how to proceed, however, is a monumentally tricky task that requires buy-in from, and communications between, multiple levels of the organization.

–Carl Weinschenk