Applications from the tap

Everyone would agree that without electricity most organisations would grind to a halt. But almost no organisations (hospitals a notable exception in case of power failures) create their own electricity. We totally depend on the electricity grid and we accept the standards that go with it. The same goes for IT: most organisations cannot work without IT. However, many organisations take care of their own IT. That will change according to the new book of Nicholas Carr called 'The Big Switch'. Along the analogy of electricity, the book claims that in the future most of the computing power will be standard and easily available. As an example the author names 3Tera, a company that provides an application called AppLogic. This application allows you to 'draw' an infrastructure of IT-components and when you're done, this environment will be built virtually and you will be charged by actual usage. The big data centers used to be the domain of the big corporations, and now you can build them yourselves. There will be a computer grid just like there is an electricity grid.

The book reminded me of a fascinating article in BusinessWeek about Google and their initiatives for cloud computing. Google builds it's own 'cloud' of computers that acts as a giant grid of computing power. Special software called MapReduce makes it possible to run e.g. searches with enormous speed, because the search is split into tiny problems that when solved are brought together. SAP, the ERP-giant, takes the next step with it's new generation of webbased software SAP by Design. You can adapt the software to your needs within your own online environment.

In the future, you can just as easily use software as electricity.And just like with electricity, you will pay by the usage without hefty up-front license fees that we now associate software with.