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January 28, 2008
Nick Carr: IT Prognosticator
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In this interview with GRIDtoday, Nicholas Carr, author of the controversial book "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," predicts what enterprise IT will look like as computing continues to move into "the cloud." He offers insights on the "revolutionary" nature of today's virtualization technologies, the future revenue model for IT vendors, and whether the Web will be able to handle the load.
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GRIDtoday: To begin, can you briefly describe what will comprise “the big switch” and discuss how our interaction with computing will be altered in the years to come?
NICHOLAS CARR: By “the big switch” I mean a transformation in the nature of computing that’s going on right now, where we’re going from running our software and our computers privately and locally to more of a utility model where the computer functions we rely on -- whether at home or at work -- will be supplied over the Internet, which will become the equivalent of the electric grid for computing functions.
I think we can see this happening fairly quickly, particularly if you look at how individuals use their PCs these days; in essence, they’ve already made the big switch to online computing. Smaller companies are the next to make the move, and larger companies will probably be the slowest -- although in certain areas, such as software as a service, they’re making the move, as well.
Gt: How will this switch affect
corporate computing and enterprise datacenters? Will we actually see big
business adopt utility computing on a widespread scale?
CARR: I think for big businesses, the change probably will play out over a couple of decades. It’s not as if one day we wake up and everything’s changed and what used to be done locally is now done over the Net. It’s going to be a process of transition, where even very large companies are going to pull in more and more of the functions they need off the Web while also continuing to run their own datacenters and to run their own applications locally. I think we can see how some of the transformation will play out: companies will probably begin to bring in particular general business applications as services (the way they’re doing with Salesforce.com or Employease with HR applications), and at the same time they’ll be rebuilding their own internal IT operations to run more the way external utilities run. Over time, their own datacenters will merge with the general computing grid and, eventually, I think we can see a time when you’ll be able to run pretty much any software you need -- whether it’s a general software-as-a-service application or a customized application that you’ve developed yourself -- off the grid from utility datacenters. At that point -- and that might be a decade or two away -- all of computing begins to look much more like a utility.
Gt: Utility services exist right
now, but companies aren’t exactly flocking to them. What will drive the
increased adoption you foresee?
CARR: I think on one level it is cost. If you look at big companies ... current studies show that if they’re not flocking to the utility model, they’re certainly beginning to move there at a fairly rapid pace. If you move toward software as a service, not only are you replacing the capital cost of buying the software and licensing the software ... but you also avoid the need to buy the computers that run the applications, hire the people who maintain the computers that run the applications, and pay for the electricity and real estate necessary to house those computers. So it really represents, in many cases, substantial cost savings.
If you look at the big trends in big-company IT right now, you see this move toward a much more consolidated, networked, virtualized infrastructure; a fairly rapid shift of compressing the number of datacenters you run, the number of computers you run. Ultimately ... if you can virtualize your own IT infrastructure and make it much more efficient by consolidating it, at some point it becomes natural to start to think about how you can gain even more advantages and more cost savings by beginning to consolidate across companies rather than just within companies.
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