Two seemingly opposed forces are at work in today’s networked computing environment: consolidation and diffusion. Curiously, both ideas are positioned as the saving grace of the beleaguered, cost-conscious corporate IT manager. More curious still, both are.
Let’s start with consolidation. After Y2K and the Internet bubble reshuffled corporate IT priorities, multimillion-dollar implementations were out; point solutions were in. In recent years, we’ve seen dozens of products attacking singular problems that have infested the IT environment – among them spam, virus and malware. These problems begot products that came in the guise of client applications, server software and hosted services. They are purchased by site license and subscription. And they are difficult to manage.
Where there is management pain, there are new ventures lining up to ease the agony, and we will most certainly see these point solutions nicely wrapped into easy-to-buy, easy-to-manage integrated network security. I suspect the big-name players in point solutions for enterprise security will be buying some smart start-ups and coming to market with integrated products. For those not ready to toss out the tried-and-true on a promise of better integration and management, look for the smart products that enable a measured migration from point products to integrated suites.
The driver for diffusion is the same as for consolidation: IT organizations have turned their backs on complex, expensive, time-intensive, corporatewide application deployments. Of course, deciding there’s no IT budget for complex projects to integrate information didn’t obviate the need for information sharing and integration. Into that void comes a number of smart start-ups that have built lightweight products for information sharing, document management, project tracking and team collaboration. None requires major information architecture overhauls, and some don’t require IT intervention. These systems start with simple questions, such as “Who has the latest version of a document?” or “Is the project on time?” Then they go about the task of providing simple solutions to answer questions.
The creators of these solutions took as design principles the fact that these systems need to be flexible. They have to accommodate workgroups that are distributed throughout a company and throughout the globe. They have to provide enterprise-class reliability and usability. And they can’t be a burden to the IT infrastructure, including its budgets and people. These design principles are driving the next generation of hosted project, document and knowledge management systems.
So consolidation and diffusion begin to work together. The tools required to provide a stable and scalable network infrastructure are consolidating to support a secure and manageable network over which diffused, server-less applications deliver business benefits without IT overhead. These two trends will most certainly be on display at DemoFall 2005, to be held Sept. 19-21 in Huntington Beach, Calif. To see these ideas unfold firsthand, visit www.demo.com.
Shipley is executive producer of The Demo Conferences, a semiannual Network World-owned event that launches and showcases the newest emerging technology products and services. She can be reached at chris@demo.com.
