There are always lessons in history, if we are prepared to learn from them, and I come from the BW (Before Windows) era, a time which does have some things to teach us, I feel.  

For example, there came the point of IoW (Initiation of Windows) where a whole new golden future opened up before us – theoretically, at least. In practice, of course, it’s early days achieved very little and gained very little market traction. Then came Windows 2, which those with long memories will recall moved the world forward hardly at all. 

It was only when Windows 3 appeared that potential users not only started to understand what was possible but to make the move to adopt it. But even then, it still had its problems with bugs and the like and it was not until the arrival of Windows 3.1 that the system gained a measure of reliability that gave users real confidence in not just its capabilities but its survivability in the real world. 

But its success was such that the `Version 3.1’ tag became the accepted nomenclature of an acceptable level of product maturity for a wide range of software products. There is a learning here, I feel, which is particularly important for any business looking to make web services an integral part of their operational business process infrastructure.  

Web 2.0 has already become an important marketing tag – in fact `2.0’ is being applied to just about everything and anything to do with IT systems these days. As a catch-all handle to define the next step forward I guess it even works, up to a point at least. But history shows that `Version 2.0’ as a half-hearted miss, and we are already seeing signs of the problem now.  

Web 2.0 is demonstrating some interesting and powerful potential, particularly in the way mashup capabilities are pointing to entirely new ways in which specific composite applications can create new functionality. It is only a step to think in terms of extending the idea into exploiting enterprise infrastructures to create some potentially truly powerful services.  

The downside of this, at the moment, is that there has been little or no thought applied to the management of such capabilities or their governance. For example, the fact that an individual can think of a new way of processing insurance claims by mashing up some legacy and new applications in a novel fashion does not mean it is a good idea – in business process management terms – to do it. History shows that there needs to be a balance between the `that’s cool’ application of technology just because we can, and the `yes but….’ of ensuring that the reasons for its existence is understood and justified, and that it operates in a reliable and predictable manner. 

Historically, the `yes but….’  came with the appearance of Version 3.1, and that part of the relationship between the Web and enterprise infrastructure has still to be reached.

It was good to see both Joe Tucci, EMC chairman, president and chief executive, and Howard Elias, president of EMC’s Global Services and Resource Management Software operations confront the changing world that corporate IT is facing. Speaking at the company’s recent annual bash, EMC World, both stressed the need for IT vendors to move from an applications-centric world to an information-centric one. 

Tucci, in particular, referred to the way that information – often vital business information that should be available to all within a company – lies effectively trapped in individual machines. It should, he suggested, actually be available to all that need it (and obviously have the authority to use it) within The Cloud. He is, of course, correct. But that one sentence contains the essence of the big problem IT vendors now face – and must face down – if they are to get past being hobbled in the long term by sticking with an applications-centric focus. 

That problem is to get business users to accept the sense of an information-centric model. Many would say that they do, of course, but they themselves are largely hobbled by both a justified fear and a larger, unwarranted paranoia encompassed by that phrase: ‘and obviously have the authority to use it’. If their data is somewhere out in The Cloud, then by definition it is no longer `theirs’. If I had £1 for every time I have heard business users talk about the need to ‘own’ their own data I would be a reasonably rich man.  

There is still, and it seems will be for some time yet, a fear and dread amongst many users that not having their own data on their own systems in their own premises puts the whole business at risk. It is as if they fear that, if they cannot go and stroke or kick the very box in which their data is located then it is not really `theirs’ at all and they have lost control of it. What is worse it is, ipso facto, therefore open to all. 

This is inevitably a temporary problem. Many senior business managers – the current ones with the power to make decisions on moving away from information ownership – are still old enough to remember filing cabinets. Perhaps the next generation of managers (and certainly the one after that) brought up with the Internet and a healthy disassociation between information ownership and well managed, secure information exploitation that comes as part of using social software, will not think twice about where their data is. They will just concern themselves with its proper use. 

Some of what constitutes `proper use’ will, of course, still involve companies physically owning their own data. The most obvious example of this is any business process that involves high throughput, high speed transaction management, such as found in modern banking. There, physical issues such as the speed of light get in the way, for it sets the limit on how fast transaction messages can be delivered point-to-point. It takes light some 30ms to go coast to coast in the
US, and many big transaction management systems now need those messages delivered a good deal faster; so The Cloud will get in the way here.  

But in many other business processes, the location of the data is irrelevant – and it is arguably now more vulnerable and insecure than in a well-designed and implemented Cloud system, and can probably be accessed quicker. 

But there seems little sign yet that too many users readily accept these fundamental changes in their attitude. Indeed, I wonder whether EMC’s public lauding of such a change could work against it, with the collective paranoia driving users to walk by on the other side of the street? 

Perhaps the time is coming for EMC – and the other infrastructure players from servers to SaaS – to come together to start an educational process for the user community. A social computing site for educating business users would be a good start point.

A couple of recent announcements out of IBM once again pose questions about not only the future scope of parallel computing but also the timescale encompassed by that word `future’. 

The multicore Cell processor has so far made its name well away from corporate computing, being used in graphics-based applications in systems like Sony’s Playstation 3. A new version is just about to appear, however, and this will feature the addition of much stronger floating point capabilities. This is just what is needed to make it suitable for applications in areas such as large, complex financial calculations – things like risk management which, as our current economic situation seems to demonstrate well, is still largely at the Ouija Board/pint of brandy/take a guess level of incisiveness. 

As has been found before, where the financial community leads the rest of business starts to follow in the fullness of time. If the new Cell processor shows itself capable of giving financial calculations some real clout there could be growing pressure from business users to exploit its capabilities elsewhere. 

This could be supported by the appearance of a new idea from the company’s labs. We have all got used to hearing about High Performance Computing (HPC), the world of scientific and academic supercomputers where parallelism is a core part of the natural order. There has been a good deal of talk over the last few years about HPC making it down into the grubbier world of business and commerce, but there are some problems with this notion, mainly concerned with the fundamentals of the software architecture being geared to high level computational tasks. 

So engineers at IBM’s labs have come up with a different approach, High Throughput Computing (HTC), which is seen as being far better architected for the needs of business users. Though still a long way from being an official product, HTC is being lined up to create a software platform that can make parallel supercomputers like IBM’s Blue Gene architecture far more amenable to the commercial world. 

IBM is working with the Condor Project Team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a joint development effort is now in place to create the HTC environment for Blue Gene systems. One of the keys to Condor is its ability to match resource requests made by incoming jobs with resource offers from what is available in the system. It can even exploit unused desktop resources, and can work with either serial or parallel jobs. 

Such an environment could even help get round one of the fears concerning the coming of parallel computing in business – that while it is probably inevitable and will quite possibly prove to be a `good thing’ in the long term, the pain of getting from here to there could be severe and even damaging for some.  

If HTC can work effectively and contentedly with serial and parallel code, it could be the basis for a long-term bridge between here and there. If it can then work with Cell-based servers, which run Linux, the basis for a real stepping stone between serial/legacy architectures and parallelism maybe just around the corner.

“Two tower cranes, one bulldozer and a datacentre? They’ll be with you by Friday, sir.”  

So there may develop a `plant hire’ niche market, particularly if the supplier is also a provider of utility/SaaS/Cloud services. Then the containers could still be part of the `whole’. They could be in the Cloud, back at base providing resources generally, or they could be relocated – physically as well as logically – to where they are needed, yet still be in The Cloud itself.

I wish to propose a heresy: that the word `computing’ is no longer helpful in the description of anything useful in the world of business information management infrastructures. I am thinking of the latest buzz-phrase to surface that tries to encapsulate the way information management tools are developing – `Cloud Computing’. Neither of these words are particularly appropriate, in my view, but the word `computing’ is really starting to get in the way. 

The most important point here is that, once the Computing-word is used the clear implication is that the technology is the most important aspect of what is happening. The means is more important than the end and should remain so. But with business information systems, the end in question is the delivery of a business process that makes sense – and preferably money – for the overall business. How it gets to be completed is secondary to it being completed accurately, reliably and in a timely fashion. 

In one way, the `Cloud’ is a good term for the way information systems are changing, even if it has been slightly misappropriated and extended in meaning from its original use in communications only. But yes, an increasing amount of the services and processes a business requires can now be provided from within the Cloud, without the user knowing – and arguably needing to care – what it is, where it is, or what is providing it.  

Even where businesses still feel it important to maintain ownership of their data in some way, usually by maintaining onsite facilities, the Computing-word part of it is at last starting to take a back seat. Take data warehousing as an example; specialist companies like Netezza have carved a niche here by providing this capability as an appliance – which gets a good way along the road to being a `sealed box’ solution to a problem. It is an approach that is obviously working as well, for data warehousing’s big name, Teradata, has just launched a range of small, appliance solutions itself. 

At the same time however,Kognitio, has taken things one step further with the introduction of a SaaS-delivered data warehouse solution. Already labelled a DaaS – which itself presages a whole new category of  `aaS’ offerings – this allows users to pay for space and warehousing services on its own datacentres. And if a business lacks the skills to set one up themselves, Kognitio can do it for them.  

Yes, businesses will have to pay for this, but they will undoubtedly pay less than trying to hire-in the expertise as staff, and the chances are they will get better-quality services than if done in-house. And in making that step, they will be one step further away from direct concerns with the technology, and the Computing-word will grow less important, less relevant to them.