February 24th, 2005
The network services ecology
After a two week hiatus, Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos (and former MIT computer science professor) resurfaced with another blog item on a familiar Sun theme: utility computing. Greg expands the vision a bit with a diagram (see below) outlining the building blocks of the new stack and ecosystem that transitions from traditional packaged software to network application services–software-as-a-service on top of intrastructure-as-a-service sold by the drink.
The New Stack = Network Services Ecology*
*Adapted from Papadopoulos’ weblog
Greg writes: I’ll bet that this will give rise to whole new "Application Networks" that aggregate and stitch together the network applications to create the whole fabric of completely re-factored enterprise IT, or perhaps new styles of businesses entirely. Somebody is going to make a lot of money on this layer.
He goes on to talk about how this revised stack will alter the balance of power in the computing industry. But, refactoring of enterprise IT is at least a decade long, industrywide effort, and today requires synchronization and integration of thousands of disparate moving parts and standards development, unless companies are willing to bulldoze most of what they have and start from a clean slate based on the most modern, not fully tested technologies, primarily packaged together and developed by a single vendor.
Delivering software and infrastructure as a service can eliminate a huge amount of complexity for customers, but that doesn’t mean that the service providers are immunized against unmanageable systems. In fact, the price of software and infrastructure as a service is directly related to the complexities that service providers must endure to deliver services. Selling CPU cycles or storage is simple and cheap compared to running hundreds of enterprise applications as network services, each of which could touch hundreds of data sources and user systems, with various service levels, authentication systems, thousands of Web services, and applications competing for resources.
The industry likes to talk about ecosystems and grand changes in the balance of power, suggesting some imminent cataclysm, power shift and ecological evolution. No doubt, software and intrastructure as a service is a major force that is reshaping how IT is delivered and consumed, but the pace of change is more glacial than rapid fire. You’ll be able to watch the movements of the giants and the upstarts jockeying for position, watch Darwinian principles in action, and determine who you would trust to be a good utility service provider. Now, we need to hear from Greg–and others–exactly who he thinks will ascend (besides Sun in his vision) and who will descend into oblivion as services take hold, and why, so those inclined to sport can better handicap the race…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
