A grid infrastructure may not be the case for certain organizations. The reasons for this may be one of enterprise size, IT policy, outsourcing model, lack of budget, or ISV certification. In these circumstances it is generally recognised as good practice for applications with non-intensive workloads to use server virtualisation in order to consolidate. However, where maximising consolidation, availability and agility are of paramount importance, a combination of server virtualisation and grid-based solutions are the best way to maximise the benefits of consolidation, availability and agility. Working in tandem, they can ensure enhanced server virtualisation, the ability to dynamically scale within and across nodes, and the dynamic resizing of virtual nodes. Compared to other models of computing, IT systems designed and implemented in the grid style deliver a higher quality of service, at a lower cost, with greater flexibility. Higher quality of service results from having n...

The business world is adopting an on-demand model, and for a very good reason: the business environment is changing faster and becoming more unpredictable. That leaves us with a choice to incorporate the change in our core business or spend money, time and effort in exploring the past trends. How many times has it happened in the past? We made our cost benefit analysis, the savings looked terrific, the solution got implemented, and life was happy go lucky. Then the reorganization happened, the planning went out of window, and now we’re saddled into an IT infrastructure system that doesn’t fit the new situation we are in now. That’s business today. Even the list of things that are changing is changing. What we need is a solution that’s designed for change. What we need is an on-demand business model. We need to be able to change with a change in the IT infrastructure system. And if, the IT infrastructure is an important part of your bus...

Having survived Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) projects, enterprises are looking for fresh ways to accelerate business and to increase efficiency and agility. Web services, a set of technologies that automate business processes,promise the speed and agility that enterprises seek to create a competitive edge. Unlike previous technological innovations that required re-engineering work or hands-on intervention from end users in order to effect changes, Web services are layered onto existing applications and are themselves self-adapting, capable of discovering and querying one another automatically, and able to connect, compare, assess, re-configure, and transact as quickly as business needs demand. The result is an unprecedented degree of automation, efficiency, and agility. Constellations of business connections and trading networks can appear overnight as Web services automatically pursue opportunities that even the most diligent h...

Today, most sizable IT organizations have hundreds, if not thousands, of licenses for software tools that are critical for building and running the databases and applications that power their business. Managing these tools and their associated licenses, including deploying, provisioning, and updating them, is time-consuming and incurs many hidden costs. There are also real productivity costs when IT professionals can’t readily access the tools they need at the right time. On the other hand, putting a bunch of tools on a server with no management, provisioning or usage tracking capabilities around them can come at an even higher cost. So then, where should IT professionals or anyone else responsible for setting up and managing a tools infrastructure look for answers? The latest phenomenon sweeping the IT landscape – cloud computing – may hold the most promise to overcome this issue. The reduced complexity, lower costs and improved scalability afforded by enterprise clouds ar...

The IT industry today consists of a rapidly evolving and massively interconnected network of organizations, technologies, products and consumers. In contrast with the vertically integrated environment of the 1990s and millennium 2000, today’s industry is divided into a large number of domains producing customized components, systems, and services. The degree of interaction between firms in the industry is truly astounding, with substantial number of organizations frequently involved in the design, development, out sourcing, or implementation of even a single module of enterprise software suites. The IT ecosystem began the 21st century by entering a deep recession, made worse by over investments and business failures in the IT, Software and Telecommunications industries. At around the same time, Microsoft Corporation and the US Department of Justice entered into a Consent Decree (“Consent Decree”) that resolved their multi-year antitrust dispute. Since, this period of retrenchment, the ...

Shared Service Model is collaborative approach to pool in all the resources into one. This approach allows the economies of scale, pooled experience, associative responsiveness, partnerships with in the organization for low cost and high quality. An internal business unit works as a service provider to the business clients that fulfills the non-core businesses and fragments the core business with higher epxertise within the pool of intelligent resources, with other business units of the same organization. Business organizations request products and services within the organization from the one of the business unit so called 'Shared Service Provider'. The various business units are billed interally and their costs are recovered through revenue generation. Since, these clusters of internal business units have to show profitability for their own existence. They normally buffers up some margins in the cost offered to the 'Shared Service Provider', which is a wrong practice....

In a recent survey from Forbes, a big question poped up. Is the demand for IT services down or up? Well, the experts have said it right that "demand is still very strong". It's the companies who are cutting down budgets on new assets, hires, software, and hardware. They are trying to meet customer's needs with existing resources. Infact, they are curtailing consultants rather than consultancy. Most of the data is digitized and the volume of transactions are growing like anything. A robust data management infrastructure through data consolidation (green data center) and virtualization have some answers to cut down on cost and might bring a smile on the CIOs face to add some value to the customer's growing needs of humangous transactions. The transation-volume-revenue, equation has broken down. But, the amount of work involved is growing at it's own pace. In the early years of 2000 the focus was on outsourcing when we were trapped in similar recession then. Now,...