Corporates are mashing up and moving online
By Paul Budde
Based on the speed of developments in the Internet world we will see more and more corporations following the lead of the Internet media companies and migrating applications, storage, CRM and data hosting to online-based systems.

The virtualisation of servers and the wider deployment of flash memory are also fuelling these new developments. Increasingly computer manufacturers are introducing computers without disk drives, flash being considerably faster and more durable than current disk drives. Similar to its use in data centres, flash developments also prove to be better suited to new software requirements like MS Vista, which require much faster processing. Think about the combination of the new mobile devices and flash and it is clear that flash is going to be a revolutionary agent.

Importantly, these new developments are also more environmental friendly as they require considerably less hardware and use less energy. Furthermore, they will use the wired and integrated systems to mash up data from different sources in order to expand their intelligence services.

As we at BuddeComm have stated on other occasions, the smaller companies will benefit first from these developments, as more and more outsourcing facilities become available to host their needs. For the first time shared resources are making these services economically viable for many smaller organisations.

Unfortunately this market continues to be under-serviced. Unlike their corporate counterparts smaller companies don't have sufficient internal IT resources and the ICT industry has an extremely poor track record in servicing this market - a situation that is unlikely to change any time soon. This will drive more and more companies to overseas websites in order to profit from the new developments

Web-based mash-up services are one of the most hotly debated developments in the IT industry because this opens up a whole new area of IT services which until recently, it has been impossible to develop in an economically feasible way.

Way back in the late 1990s we alluded to this market, when the first data centres started to arrive. However, like many of the dot com services, at that point the timing was wrong. Broadband has stimulated the development of new services and they, in turn, are now fuelling progress for data centres, CRM, outsourcing and ASP/MASP - (managed) applications service providers.

We are just at the beginning of the second blooming of these developments and BuddeComm anticipates at least five golden years ahead for this market.

For more information see -
2007 Technology - Internet - Volume 1 - Infrastructure
2007 Global Internet - Volume 2 - Online Content and Services

Top of Page