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When Sun introduced the idea of On-Demand Services last year, this was seen in some quarters as an attack on Web Services - as if there was some opposition between "on-demand" and "web". But when IBM chief Sam Palmisano recently devoted a major presentation to the idea of On-Demand Computing, the sense of opposition between "on-demand" and "web" becomes increasingly untenable.
As the recent work of IBM and others makes clear, "on-demand" and "web", along with "smart", "differentiated" and other adjectives, are simply complementary ways of describing the characteristics of the emerging service-based economy. In fact, as the industry becomes more familiar with Services, these adjectives may simply become redundant qualifiers. (Is anybody in future going to bother developing or selling Off-Demand or Unintelligent Services?)
IBM's vision of On-Demand Computing brings together a number of interesting topics, which we have previously reported as separate areas of technological innovation: Web Services, Grid Computing, Autonomic Systems (encompassing Immune Systems) and Differentiated Services. In this article, we provide an update on these topics, and show how they work together to support the service-based economy.
EXTRACTS:
Sun Microsystems sees the future in technological terms. a "third wave of network computing that will transform business as it delivers connectivity, communications and commerce securely on any device, anytime, anyplace. Everything with a digital heartbeat will connect to a dramatically more efficient and responsive business infrastructure that delivers increasingly personalized and relevant services at a lower cost." Sun clearly recognizes the potential for business transformation, but this can be seen as the end-result of a technological development program.
In contrast, IBM talks about business transformation without mentioning technology at all, so that the issues of demand are placed firmly in a business context. IBM goes beyond the notion of on-demand computing, to define an on-demand business as "an enterprise whose business processes - integrated end to end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers - can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat".
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