Weekly Review: Pieces Are Falling into Place

All the individual islands of computing on desktops and in enterprises are gradually being linked together as the Internet extends its reach in every direction. Last week's news saw several more of those links fall into place.

Speak Out

Will subscription-based options such as those offered by HP and British Telecom be a driving force to move companies to accepting the concept of software as a service? Offer your views in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

Subscription computing received a boost on two continents Tuesday (March 6th). Hewlett-Packard and British Telecom each launched services that allow small businesses to rent computers, Internet connection and software as an all-in-one bundle for a monthly fee. The announcements lent blue-chip weight to the model, previously pioneered by US-based startups such as CenterBeam and everdream.

HP's Extended Office provides US small businesses with a choice of a desktop or laptop computer bundled with Internet access, Microsoft Office, online backup and a 24/7 support line that guarantees a response within 90 seconds. Prices start from $169 per month.

BT's Digital Office, available in Britain from £99 ($145) per month, includes a Dell PC, ISDN Internet connection, a starter website, helpdesk and onsite maintenance. BT also offers more sophisticated packages designed in collaboration with Cisco, such as a £140-a-month ($205) LAN connection bundle, and ecommerce, knowledge management and supply chain or customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

More than just software as a service, the subscription computing model offers a small business everything down to the PC as a continuously managed service. HP's offering in particular takes advantage of the Internet connection to provide bug fixes, anti-virus updates, software upgrades and nightly backups as part of the service. This ability to remotely manage the local desktop and LAN infrastructure will become increasingly important as access devices and the applications they run become more complex.

Peer computing
The first generation of ASPs assumed that all applications would be delivered from the network and that there would be none left to be managed at the client site. But any hope that life will ever be that simple is rapidly fading. The Internet is becoming a far more complex environment where software and applications operate collaboratively across multiple locations, including individual desktops and LAN servers.

Even Sun, a former champion of a massively consolidated model of network-based computing, has acknowledged how differently things will work out. Last week it plunged further into the emerging field of distributed peer computing (more popularly known as P2P) with its purchase of hot P2P startup InfraSearch Inc. See related story, Sun Snags InfraSearch in Move Towards P2P.

The InfraSearch team — whose technology enables a distributed search engine that provides search results based on realtime content — will be folded into Sun's distributed computing research incubator Project Juxtapose, which is led by co-founder and distinguised computer scientist Bill Joy. Evidently Sun has now decided that Internet computing will reach out to reside on desktops and enterprises, rather than being concentrated in centralized Internet data centers.

Meanwhile Thursday (March 8th) saw the launch of a new specification that aims to help link business processes across multiple organizations — so that companies really can use the Internet to automate real-time business collaboration between multiple systems.

The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), published by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org), aims to bridge the gap between legacy IT infrastructures and newly emerging B2B collaboration protocols such as BizTalk, ebXML and RosettaNet. According to Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), one of the group's primary backers, standardizing the way that business processes are represented will overcome an important obstacle on the path to enabling effective cross-enterprise networking.

Business-grade Internet
Like it or not, all these developments mean that the Internet is fast becoming a mission-critical ingredient in doing business. Fortunately, new services are emerging that will take it from its current rickety consumer-grade status to business-grade reliability.

One such example is the first of an intended suite of managed DNS services from Verisign, which builds on its standing as the owner of domain name registrar Network Solutions Inc (NSI). The inherent dangers of managing DNS in-house were amply demonstrated by Microsoft at the end of January, when several of its main websites went offline after a technician made a configuration error — see the Jan. 27th weekly review.

Verisign's new secondary DNS hosting service is a proposition that every major website operator should take very seriously, offering as it does nothing less than a 100% uptime guarantee. In other words, it guarantees that what happened to Microsoft will never happen to its customers, not even for a second.

In the midst of all this activity, managed hosting services provider Loudcloud completed its Nasdaq IPO. Will Loudcloud play a vital role in managing the Internet infrastructure that underpins this emerging mesh of collaborative computing initiatives and architectures? Only time will tell — but I guess its founders and investors certainly hope so.

This review of the week's news highlights is by ASPnews.com founder and consulting analyst Phil Wainewright. A comprehensive news digest is published every month in the ASP News Review newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers.

Tools:

Add aspnews.com to your favorites Add aspnews.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x

Back to Analyst Columns