Chapter 26: Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations

“Finally, let me say just this in conclusion.”

—Anonymous

The Internet has forever altered the business arena, creating a world in which the customer is in command and the only constant is change. To succeed in this new world of e-business requires an infrastructure that gives you maximum performance, real-time responsiveness, application flexibility, and simplified management.

Summary

A short time ago, the Internet was primarily about surfing the Web and visiting cool sites. Then, people began to realize the Internet could transform the business landscape. The race was on to develop new and hybrid business models in order to compete in the dot.com or “click-and-mortar” arena.

Unfortunately, as many companies found out during the last two e-tailing seasons, simply having an Internet-based business plan is not enough. Companies are discovering that customers take e-business applications just as seriously as they take traditional business applications. They demand the same level of performance and availability, and many e-businesses are finding their infrastructure isn’t ready to meet the demands of serious e-business.

The question facing businesses today, therefore, is what’s going to happen to their infrastructure and their business model when those 68 million online customers become 680 million—or 6 billion? Looking ahead, what will happen when they begin accessing the Internet from wireless smart phones and PDAs, over high-speed cable modem or digital subscriber line connections^[4]? Thus, this part of the chapter summarizes and explores some of the implications to both business and business computing of the continuing evolution of e-business.

The Next Generation of E-Business

Follow the business news and it’s easy to be convinced that the e-business revolution isn’t complete; the fact is, the revolution has hardly started. A recent survey by Price Waterhouse Coopers and The Conference Board stated that large enterprises were moving into e-business at a much slower pace than previously expected. Nearly 78 percent of the large enterprises surveyed were not yet processing transactions online. For 83 percent of the companies, e-business was generating less than 8 percent of revenue.

Also, according to analysts at the International Data Corp., there were fewer than 600 million Web users worldwide. But, the vast untapped potential on each side of the digital marketplace is only the beginning. Also, driving change is the next-generation Internet, which provides very high bandwidth at very low cost. The result will not only be vast numbers of new users, but users who will be logging on with an array of new devices. For example, IDC estimates that mobile commerce will grow to 52 million users in 2004, creating a $54-billion channel^[3].

What that means is over the next few years, you will see a marketplace that is defined by explosion and convergence: an explosion of new devices, new users, new media and transactions, and a convergence of standards to bring it all together. As a result, every business today must begin to ask some strategic questions with this continuing evolution in mind: how do you evolve your infrastructure, what are the right architectures and interfaces to build on, and what products and services do you need? The answers to these questions will define the infrastructure for the next generation of e-business.

The Next-Generation Infrastructure

What will the infrastructure for serious e-business look like? The answer is that the next-generation infrastructure will be as diverse as the organizations that build it. Each company will customize its infrastructure based on its strategy and growth plans, and will depend on the continuing development of open Internet standards to ensure interoperability with trading partners and customers alike.

There are, however, three key characteristics of a serious e-business infrastructure: it must provide disciplined systems management, it must be flexible enough to absorb the new technologies that are coming at us at a blinding rate, and it must be able to provide the optimized performance to handle the demands of different e-business workloads. These characteristics, in turn, define three key requirements for the servers that will form the foundation of that infrastructure. To support serious e-business, servers must provide new ways to manage end-to-end growth, risk and costs, choice in selecting, building and deploying applications, and extreme performance matched with scalability, reliability, and security.

New Ways to Manage

In the changing e-business environment, no one can afford for IT staffing to grow at the same rate as the IT infrastructure. New ways must be found to control software licensing costs as well. Simpler, more effective management can play a crucial role in the critical transition of IT from a cost center to a profit center in the new world of e-business.

Choice in Applications

As the next generation of e-business unfolds, value will often be determined by the ability to deliver new services customized to meet changing customer needs faster than the competition. Today, however, there is often a conflict between those responsible for ensuring quality of service and those charged with rapidly deploying new business applications. What’s required is the freedom to run any application on the server that offers the right combination of cost, performance, and growth capabilities for the job—as well as the ability to integrate critical data wherever it resides on the network.

Extreme Performance

Experience has demonstrated that e-business is based on three types of tasks: the traditional data/transaction processing jobs, such as “back-office” tasks, the newer generation of “front-office” and Web-serving applications, and a variety of network management jobs. Each of these tasks calls for varying levels of performance, and each demands a server optimized for the job. In other words, one size does not fit all in an e-business infrastructure.

Finally, delivering information in a way that doesn’t keep customers waiting requires much more than fast servers. It will involve a whole new level of connectivity supporting an unprecedented level of integration across the virtual enterprise so that customer-critical information is available whenever and wherever needed.

^[4][4] Vacca, John R., Wireless Data Demystified, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2003.

^[3]Vacca, John R., i-mode Crash Course, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2001.