SIMPLIFYING THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE Most CEOs would cringe at the idea that IT infrastructure—the way architectures and associated technology resources are organized—will determine the agility with which companies can carry out good strategy. Yet the difficulty and cost of modifying today's rigid IT architectures—dominated by big enterprise applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and large application suites, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and many others—can be so high that some companies would rather abandon new strategic initiatives than make a single change to the applications they already have in place. Businesses need to reduce costs and sprawling networks as well as respond more quickly to changing business environments. In today's typical IT environment, there may be three to four tiers of computing, with caching and security servers on the front end, application servers as a middle layer, and transaction and data processing servers on the end. Add to this another layer of complexity with Internet servers, Web services, and portals, and it gets even worse. By reducing the tiers of computing, customers may gain cost savings and create an environment where they can deploy new technologies, such as Linux and grid solutions, to create a dynamic operating environment capable of responding more flexibly to changing business or customer requirements. Businesses reducing the tiers of computing are using a scale-out and scale-up approach. Scale-out systems, such as Blade servers, allow customers to add compute capacity by the processor; while scale-up systems—mainframe and mainframe-class servers—grow like building blocks. Buy when you need it. Install it, and use it. Good news is on the horizon in the form of service-oriented architectures, which promise to reduce, if not remove, the current obstacles to less complexity. | 
