Five Trends Bubbling Under the Surface of IT

There are always many new and shifting paradigms shaping the direction of enter­prise information technology. We’ve talked many times here about the mega­trends that are upending our preconceived notions of how data centers should be built, run, and financed, such as open source and SOA. Here at Database Trends and Applications and Unisphere Research, we have also been watching a proliferation of new trends bubbling under the surface. Will they emerge as full-fledged data center megatrends in their own right? It remains to be seen – enterprise IT and data centers tend to be relatively conservative and cautious about leaping into new paradigms. So the impact of some trends may take years to be fully felt.

The money is now following software as a service. They say if you want to know where things are going, follow the money. At the beginning of March, i2 and IBM announced an initiative in which the two companies will collaborate to offer i2′s FreightMatrix application on an on-demand subscription basis. Dave Mitchell, direc­tor of software as a service strategy for IBM, told me in a recent interview that nowa­days, ‘most of the start-up application vendors are selecting SaaS as their primary model, and increasingly as their sole model for delivering applications. It’s gotten to the point now where most of the venture capital firms are only investing in ISVs that deliver their applications as a software service.’ Networking giant Cisco also sees gold in the SaaS model, having just plunked $3.2 billion down on WebEx, the online conferencing service.

While SaaS shows a lot of promise as a software delivery method, the model still has to be proven – and there are still concerns about data security and service reliability.

Virtualization is hot, thanks to data center consolidation initiatives. One major analyst firm reportedly scaled down its forecasts for server shipments – especially for commodity platforms – through 2010 by 4.5 million servers, all due to virtualization. Of course, the mainframe has been virtualized for years, meaning it has been stealth­ily taking on new workloads the whole time, well beneath the radar of industry ana­lysts and pundits. If anything, there are more end-users for mainframe-based appli­cations than at any time in its history, thanks to Web services and SOA. You just don’t need as many mainframes to support this growth, thanks to virtualization and the efficiency of the way the system handles workloads.

Expect to see more virtualiza­tion across the board, especially in non-mainframe environments. ‘There is absolute­ly no question in our minds that data centers are compelled to virtualize and they are going to do it in large numbers this year,’ stated Earl Hines, director of product mar­keting at uXcomm. ‘They must, simply because they are running out of power and cooling and rack space. There is no additional space to meet their needs,” said Hines.

The problem is management of large-scale operations – not easily done through virtualization. ‘There is a fundamentally different set of problems that occur when you go from tens or hundreds of something to having thousands or tens of thousands of any new technology deployed in the data center,’ said Hines.

Data centers get greener. Earlier this year, IBM announced ‘Project Big Green,’ in which it is redirecting $1 billion per year across its businesses, mobilizing the com­pany’s resources to ‘dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT.’ The savings are substantial – for an average 25,000 square foot data center, clients should be able to achieve 42 percent energy savings. Based on the energy mix in the U.S., this savings equates to 7,439 tons of carbon emissions saved per year.

Project Big Green targets corporate data centers where energy constraints and costs can limit their ability to grow. IBM will promote high-density computing systems utilizing vir­tualization technology, along with energy-efficient power and cooling technologies. At the same time, Google announced that it is nearing completion of its solar power project at its Mountain View headquarters, and estimates that it can meet 30 percent of its peak electricity demand from solar panels.

This is all commendable, and it certainly is in the best self-interest of companies to cut power costs. But how many tons of carbon emissions does the use of informa­tion technology actually help reduce? Probably far more than it emits.

Enterprise 2.0 will help increase data center productivity and empower end ­users. This year, vendors, experts, and pundits have been touting Enterprise 2.0 – an umbrella term that encompasses everything from wikis to application mashups to software as a service – as the ‘Next Big Thing’ poised to sweep enterprise comput-ing. Harvard’s Andrew McAfee, for one, predicts major shifts in the way IT is organized across the enterprise. However, Tom Davenport, noted evan­gelist of ‘Competing on Analytics,’ said Enterprise 2.0 is nice to have, but will have little impact on corporate IT operations for the foreseeable future.

As with SaaS, the advantages of Enterprise 2.0 approaches have yet to be tested and proven. Enterprise 2.0 may not deliver measurable impacts for now, but it has the potential to evolve into an enabler of greater participation and flex­ibility in IT development and manage­ment – but that’s hard to quantify.

Do more with less. That’s a phrase that has been uttered endlessly down through the decades. And, no matter what the state of the economy, the pres­sure remains on data center executives to tamp down spending and TCO as much as possible.

The greatest obstacle in the way of IT departments achieving their goals for 2007 is simple – a lack of budget, according to a proprietary study conducted by Unisphere Research, the research arm of DBTA. In a survey of 248 data management professionals and executives, 39 percent of the respondents said that a lack of budget was the primary obstacle to their IT groups achieving their goals this year. A lack of time was the second greatest obstacle, mentioned by 29 percent of the respondents, followed by lack of skilled professionals, which was tabbed by 16 percent of those who participated in the survey.

While organizations remain stingy with IT funding, they are quite willing to open up their wallets for initiatives that can directly impact the bottom line – business intelligence and analytics continue to be big spending categories.