February 5th, 2008
Opportunity computing?
Do you believe in opportunity computing?
Etelos is offering this as a new buzzword.
It basically describes a collection of hardware and software resources which can be quickly deployed out to users, as opportunity arises.
This is contrasted with utility computing, a metered on-demand system.
According to Etelos CEO Danny Kolke, opportunity computing is all about time-to-market. It includes databases, APIs, and commerce features. “Opportunity computing is really a superset of utility computing,” he writes.
It’s when you look at the tools Kolke is talking about that you begin to get the picture.
He’s combining advertising, applications, the cash register, and all the relationships which go into those elements in his model.
The question is, how far should IT people get into the realms of marketing and advertising? Can they be held accountable? Are we now going to sort marketing companies based on their computing platforms?
More to the point, how does this apply to standards and open source? If some standards, like SharePoint and OpenXML, are proprietary, how can you work in opportunity computing and not respond to that?
If we’re to have opportunity computing, in other words, the opportunity needs to be open to everyone. We can’t split marketing and fulfillment into separate proprietary and open source worlds. Can we?
Maybe it’s unfair, but this is the real world. Your time-to-market depends a lot on your ability to integrate whatever you have with others’ billing, shipping, and marketing systems. You have systems, they have systems, maybe it’s just one big system.
I think a lot of people on the C-level — CEOs, COOs, CFOs, even Chief Marketing Offices (CMOs) — will grasp this as a truth immediately.
Whether the Chief Information Officer (CIO) should look at them askance is what I’m asking you today.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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