The Rise of Service-Oriented IT and the Birth of Infrastructure as a Service

The next IT area to embrace a services orientation may be infrastructure.

By Jim Leach
Thu, March 29, 2007

CIOServices-oriented IT may turn out to be one of the major breakthroughs in the IT industry, but it won’t be an overnight success. The majority of the IT industry continues to use traditional business models of selling hardware, software and services. However, these traditional models are being expanded to embrace a services orientation. For example:

  • Hardware manufacturers: in the past sold their products as “boxes;” now using their hardware to deliver a service over a network. Today, SUN Microsystems sells servers and also sells server capacity on its grid. Storage manufacturers could do the same thing.
  • Software vendors: in the past sold their products as “shrink wrapped” applications; now using their software to deliver a service over a network. Microsoft and SAP have made significant moves in this area.
  • Outsourcing services: typically used an “asset arbitrage” model based on more effective utilization of people and more efficient management of technology; now delivering “business process outsourcing” which is essentially a service model for outsourcing with guaranteed delivery of service transactions such as human resources, accounts payable and help desk.

A similar trend is emerging in enterprise IT organizations as they introduce service models into their operations to increase the value they deliver to the business. For example, with:

  • Enterprise IT applications: Application developers that once developed “big bang” massive applications are now deconstructing complex business processes into a set of services that are expressed through rapidly developed applets that can be easily integrated into larger enterprise solutions.
  • Enterprise IT operations: In the past, enterprise IT developed unique management systems and processes; they are now using best practices frameworks such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and service level agreements based on performance metrics.

The Birth of IT Infrastructure as a Service
The next IT area which could embrace a services orientation is infrastructure. IT infrastructure can be divided into three elements:

  • Equipment: includes enterprise servers, storage, network, security devices
  • Facilities: that house, protect and power the equipment including data centers, power and cooling systems, backup generators and security systems
  • Management systems: to monitor performance of the infrastructure both onsite and remotely and to make changes as necessary

There has been tremendous innovation over the last 30 years in the individual elements of equipment, facilities and management systems. The problem is that integration between the elements has been limited as the form factor for computing has remained mostly static. When you need to run an application, you buy a server. If you want to store large data bases, you buy disk drives. To access applications and data, you need the Internet or a private network. For facilities, you either build your own data center or rent space from a colocation provider. Management software is typically provided with individual elements, but it is hard to get a view across elements.

Continue Reading

service-oriented architecture

Loading...
Most Recent Technology Topics Stories
With the right workload automation solutions, business can take much greater advantage of cloud computing, achieving faster time-to-market, reduced costs, and more flexible operations. Learn how sending the workload into the cloud can provide faster processing while also reducing capital equipment expenditures inside the data center in this white paper.
This whitepaper by Marc Staimer, Dragon Slayer Consulting, reviews urgent issues facing organizations such as the inability to recover and restore data when required and mounting financial and legal risks. It also covers an on-demand approach that instantly and cost-effectively solves these issues.
Discover how Citrix Delivery Center provides an efficient and secure architecture for virtual workforce success.
This whitepaper provides a technical and commercial comparison of Citrix® XenServer" and VMware® vSphere", two of the leading server virtualization products on the market.
Consolidation through server virtualization is a powerful agent for datacenter change.
Read about the top eight criteria you should consider when choosing a server load balancer and how Citrix NetScaler meets those requirements.
This Webcast discusses the highly scalable, superior IT optimization and workload consolidation that System z deliv...
Join Lee Weiner, Director, Support and Collaboration Technologies, LogMeIn, and guest speaker Ben Grey, Senior Anal...
Virtualization is not just for large enterprises. This expert video roundtable explains how to get started with a c...
The Fast Track to Windows 7
Users are demanding faster access to business applications and want devices that have the latest features that they...
Determining the Best Way to Virtualize
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Resource Center