Compared to the some of the ground-shaking news and revelations we’ve seen in thus far in 2008, last week was pretty non-eventful news-wise. There were no “crazy” authors spouting their “half-baked” ideas about utility computing, no Sun Microsystems planning to eliminate its datacenters, and no software colossuses making unsolicited advances toward struggling Internet giants. No, it was a slow week — and we can live with that.
However, things will pick up again, as we should hear of Yahoo’s decision this week, and, specifically for our on-demand universe, today is the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street event. This is part of a family of “on Wall Street” events put on every year — a family that includes High-Performance Computing on Wall Street — that draw a good cross-section of software vendors who make a lot of their money wooing banks and other financial institutions.
A hot session at this year’s event is sure to be the panel discussion on software as a service for financial applications, so we interviewed panel participant — and 3Tera chairman and CEO — Barry X Lynn to get his thoughts on the subject. Lynn has a deep history in the financial world going back to his IT leadership days with Wells Fargo, and, I must say, he makes for an entertaining and honest interview. Lynn talks openly about the ubiquity of SaaS in the financial world, and he elaborates on what notions might be holding it back. Of course, given that he is the CEO of a company that has received no shortage of praise over its easy-to-use, highly flexible application environment, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Lynn sees the benefits of SaaS and utility computing winning out over the long run. Reflecting on the notion of utility computing, Lynn had this to say:
“I grew fond of being able to say that utility computing, cloud computing and SaaS are the future of information technology — but I no longer say that. Information technology is maintaining, processing and moving data. My epiphany was in realizing that information technology is a subset of utility computing, rather than the other way around. Utility computing is the future. The future of information technology is that it will become a commodity offered by the utility.”
To read the entire interview (something I suggest doing), click here.
Elsewhere in this week’s issue, be sure to read about IBM’s latest cloud computing project; San Diego Supercomputer Center taking the fight to digital data; Digipede giving away licenses; Verizon Business getting on the virtualization bandwagon; and Pillar Data Systems bringing SLAs to application-storage interaction.
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Comments about GRIDtoday are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Derrick Harris, at [email protected].