The more grey-haired among us grew up in an era before
the personal computer, when our first experience of computing was
often a teletype linked at just a few hundred bits/sec to a
timeshared mainframe, writesJim
Norton. The dream in those days was to have
dedicated computing resources under your own control. Now the wheel
in computing may be turning back to a similar model, but this time
for all the right reasons.
The small and medium-sized organisations in which the vast
majority of
Institute of Directors (IoD) members work want to grow their
businesses and see IT investment as key to that goal. That has been
consistent over four years of market research involving 500 member
samples throughout the UK.
At the same time,
SMEs grow increasingly concerned about a wide range of IT
issues, from data security and business continuity to keeping up
with new technology and training. Many SMEs find the contribution
from IT is increasingly business critical, yet it is becoming ever
more difficult to support that IT professionally within their own
limited resources. They like the benefits, but they would also like
to have someone take the pain away.
For many years, the IoD has believed that what was first known
as
application service provision (ASP), and is now more frequently
referred to as
software
as a service, was of potentially great benefit to SMEs. It
could level the playing field for them against large competitors.
But until fairly recently, many SMEs did not share that view. They
remembered a time when you could pick up the phone and find no dial
tone they were not open to being sold hosted applications or
"computer tone". They wanted their IT systems where they could see
(and kick) them. Early efforts with ASP some six years ago were not
a roaring success. Yet, with SMEs increasingly locked into the
needs of sector supply chains, co-ordinated top to bottom by
networks and IT systems, cost-effective access to expensive sector
applications was becoming more important.
Key advance
The key advance in the past five years has been the move to wide
availability of fast, and increasingly cost-competitive, broadband
access. It really is becoming possible for an SME to have its
applications professionally hosted off site, accessing them through
ultra-thin clients (even just
"screen
scrapers"). Fast broadband access means low latency and good
response times can be maintained. With the right contracts and
service level agreements in place, all the hassle of virus
protection, firewalls, intruder detection, data backup, resilience,
and so on, can be offloaded. Those for whom it is a core competence
- and not a weekend chore - can look after it. SMEs can get back to
worrying about their own businesses.
Recent research by the IoD suggests attitudes among SMEs are
changing quickly to reflect the new possibilities.
SMEs now regard software as a service as a key tool, both for
saving costs and improving efficiency. Even those tools rated
higher, such as "virtual office" and "total mobility", depend on
hosted applications.
Aggressive pricing
Problems solved? Well, maybe. The key determinant will be
aggressive pricing. Many software as a service providers have still
not got fully to grips with the structure of pricing models that
will attract SMEs in their droves. In many cases, it is still just
"let's try a toe in the water". Perhaps the "green computing"
agenda will provide the final stimulus. Large server farms,
properly dimensioned and loaded, are likely to be vastly more
power-efficient than millions of individual PCs running at very low
utilisation for much of the time. Large mass-storage systems, even
with multiple layers of redundancy and backup, are likely to be far
more efficient than millions of hard drives often spinning while
scarcely used.
This debate will polarise the IT industry. We have been here
before with "network computers" and "thin clients", but genuinely
pervasive, fast and cost-effective communications were not then in
place. We won't simply see mega grid computing datacentres. Those
will certainly exist, as the ultimate data repositories, but in
practice more local grid centres will be established in major towns
and cities. Wherever you happen to be working, your processing will
be hosted (and your key data cached) quite close by in order to
ensure immediate response times. Local loop unbundling (LLU) points
might just end up as datacentres too. Those IT and service
companies that have been exploring grid technology are likely to be
cheering at this point. Those who depend on selling millions of
high-powered desktop PCs or laptops, replete with their own unique
copies of software packages with much of the functionality seldom
used, will perhaps be less impressed.
Do I really want to return to the age of timesharing? Well, once
I have got over the visceral horror of the memory, perhaps I do.
After all, if I genuinely cannot tell, in performance terms, that
the processing is not taking place on my lap or at my desktop, why
should I care? Better still, someone else can worry about all the
security and resilience issues. The UK might then cease to head the
league table for the number of
"zombied" PCs taking part in global denial-of-service attacks
with their owners blissfully unaware.