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

CIO — Services-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.

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