Making a unified solution happen

Previously, I have spoken about unified infrastructure, applications, business and government. The last two are very similar, in terms of the process, although they have different objectives.

Business must be agile enough to survive what I call hyper-competition. In a connected world, where technology develops rapidly, the challenge is to stay ahead of the curve. Government also needs comparable agility, but the goal is better service delivery for the citizen and a more efficient and transparent bureaucracy.

Whether in the private or public sector, any organisation has to deal with the fundamental issues of infrastructure and applications.

On the infrastructure side, there is mature and robust technology that works with common industry standards and specifications. Users will seldom find two pieces of hardware that cannot connect or communication protocols that cannot be integrated. In fact, the Internet itself allows communication between disparate hardware.

While there may be expenses involved in equipment and solution deployment, organisations of almost any size can fairly readily establish global network connectivity. This is because there are common, international standards. These are defined by IEEE documents. Manufacturers, vendors, solutions providers and public sector authorities adhere to them.

When it comes to software and applications, the situation is far more complex. There have been many attempts over the last 10 years to achieve industry standards or create workarounds or middleware that would resolve compatibility and communication issues. There are several industry forums where software vendors and other stakeholders participate, all intended to achieve open standards.

The primary need is to be agile - surviving the challenge of hyper-competition.

Andy Brauer is CTO of Business Connexion

While all this effort has had some success, there are also telling failures - like the inability to set down a common document format. That would seem a simple enough task, but it is hindered by proprietary interests and arguments.

Although the software vendors have evolved their mindset, there is genuinely a legacy problem. There are a lot of critical solutions out there that date back to the days of proprietary, silo systems. These cannot be replaced without large investments in time and money. There is another legacy also - software vendors compete and co-operation or even co-petition is not a concept they embrace readily. For many vendors, achieving some sort of user lock-in is important to maintaining their revenue streams.

Of course, there is no overall entity, like the IEEE, which can play a leadership role in establishing standards for software.

The Internet is driving the development of software that is modular, customisable, capable of being broken down into components, and “universally” compatible. The advantages of being connected to global networks far outweigh the difficulties involved in getting disparate systems to communicate transparently.

Users want this. The demand is enormous, from home users to multinationals. People have been predicting the imminent demise of proprietary software for a long time. What is certain is that the software that will be using in the near future will be far more agile and adaptable. It will depend on new billing models, such as subscription and pay-as-you-go models. And it has to be inherently Web-enabled and interoperable with other systems.

The industry is not there yet. It may be a while before the software industry achieves the same levels of co-operation and agreement that can be seen in other fields like television standards and so on.

It will happen. Customer demand and ubiquitous use of global networks and online services are driving this trend. Vendors know already that it is a matter of mutual self-interest to achieve common standards. But it will take time to change.

Meanwhile, customers are turning to outsourcing and bolt-on solutions to get past these obstacles.

That brings me to the real question behind global networks, virtualisation and cloud computing: what do the customers want?

In a world of global connections, with fast-changing technology, business models and business climates, the primary need is to be agile - surviving the challenge of hyper-competition.

This means having unified infrastructure, applications and processes. This is a convergence that goes far beyond the original meaning of that word in the IT industry.

What the industry is looking at in the future is the true convergence of business processes and the technology that supports them.

With or without vendor support, solutions are moving online - to outsource centres, the cloud, even the public Internet. That is what customers want.

Companies already doing this are strengthening their future positions. Those that are avoiding making a commitment to global networking take the risk that they will be left behind.

I might not be able to describe it in fine detail, but I can map out the broad outlines of the future. There will be a time when proprietary solutions are far more flexible - in use and billing models - than they are now.

The demand is obvious. Smart organisations already have the foundations in place.