[CAnet - news] The IT department is dead - Nicholas Carr

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------

 [Another provocative book by Nicholas Carr. But in general I agree with
him, except I think his vision is too limited to utility computing.  Web
2.0, SOA, IaaS (Infrastructure as a web service) will be additional services
that will be offered by clouds operated by Google, Amazon and so forth.  And
as I have often stated in this blog, I believe elimination or reduction of
CO2 emissions may also be the critical enabler, as opposed to the putative
business case benefits of virtualization and web services. The classic
example is cyber-infrastructure applications where take up by university
researchers has been disappointing (and is one of the themes at the upcoming
MardiGras conference on distributed applications).

http://www.mardigrasconference.org/

Carr uses analogy of how companies moved from owning and operating their own
generating equipment to purchasing power off the grid. This was only
possible once a robust and widescale transmission grid was deployed by
utilities.  However, this is the component that is missing in Carr's vision
with respect to utility computing and virtualization - we do not yet have
the communications networks especially in the last mile, to realize this
vision.

And finally while the traditional IT techie may disappear I can see a new
class of skills being required of "orchestration engineers" to help users
and researchers build solutions, APNs and workflows from the variety of
virtual services available from companies like Google, Amazon, IBM etc.
Some excerpts from Network world article
-- BSA]




http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/010708-carr-it-dead.html?t51hb

The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will
kill this corporate career path. So predicts Nicholas Carr in his new book,
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.
Other stories on this topic

Carr is best known for a provocative Harvard Business Review article
entitled "Does IT Matter?" Published in 2003, the article asserted that IT
investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when
one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same.

With his new book, Carr is likely to engender even more wrath among CIOs and
other IT pros.

"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in
its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the
bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the
cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control
the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of
technical people."

 Carr's rationale is that utility computing companies will replace corporate
IT departments much as electric utilities replaced company-run power plants
in the early 1900s.

Carr explains that factory owners originally operated their own power
plants. But as electric utilities became more reliable and offered better
economies of scale, companies stopped running their own electric generators
and instead outsourced that critical function to electric utilities.

Carr predicts that the same shift will happen with utility computing

Carr cites several drivers for the move to utility computing. One is that
computers, storage systems, networking gear and most widely used
applications have become commodities.

He says even IT professionals are indistinguishable from one company to the
next. "Most perform routine maintenance chores - exactly the same tasks that
their counterparts in other companies carry out," he says.

Carr points out that most data centers have excess capacity, with
utilization ranging from 25% to 50%. Another driver to utility computing is
the huge amount of electricity consumed by data centers, which can use 100
times more energy than other commercial office buildings.

"The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all using
similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar kinds of
workers, has imposed severe economic penalties on the economy," he writes.
"It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in every sector of the economy,
dampening the productivity gains that can spring from computer automation."

Carr embraces Google as the leader in utility computing. He says Google runs
the largest and most sophisticated data centers on the planet, and is using
them to provide services such as Google Apps that compete directly with
traditional client/server software from vendors such as Microsoft.

"If companies can rely on central stations like Google's to fulfill all or
most of their computing requirements, they'll be able to slash the money
they spend on their own hardware and software - and all the dollars saved
are ones that would have gone into the coffers of Microsoft and the other
tech giants," Carr says.

[..]



-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.
-----------
[email protected]
[email protected]
web: www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news