Forbes: who can win in the enterprise computing market?

CCID Net News: Forbes, February 23, Beijing timeArticleIt is pointed out that the enterprise computing field is undergoing great changes. Who will be the beneficiaries?

Without breaking the old order in the technology market, it is impossible to establish a new leader. As a result, IBM has been a dominant player in the mainframe market for decades, and the desktop market is still under the leadership of Microsoft and Intel.
However, the data center and desktop fields are undergoing huge changes, which will fundamentally change the face of the entire industry. So far, no one can laugh at the end.

The biggest problem in the data center field is that the utilization of most servers is too low. The capacity utilization of some servers is even as low as 5%! Aside from the purchase costs of those servers, their operation and cooling costs are also a great waste. Adding more cores to the server can only make things worse, because most applications cannot take advantage of multiple cores. In desktops and laptops, the ability of various software to take advantage of multiple cores is even more limited.

All major manufacturers believe that virtualization is an inevitable development direction. Compared with the single-core application software, virtualization technology allows users to run multiple applications on multiple operating system platforms on the same device. You can use built-in managementProgramTo control the priority of each application to use computing resources. In a virtualized environment, the utilization rate of hardware devices can usually reach 80% or 90%, which is significantly higher than before. Virtualization of desktops and laptops means that computers can run a variety of functions at the same time, which greatly improves productivity.

Virtualization is not a new concept. IBM has used this technology in the mainframe decades ago. However, after entering the new development stage, virtualization is a new thing. Who can win in this competition can control the key part of the enterprise market. As long as all management programs are connected to virtual machines in a proper way, the data center can provide computing services as needed, or even close most devices when not needed. Middleware is the best tool for virtualization. Whoever wins in the middleware market can achieve huge benefits.

More importantly, this is a single vendor solution. It is extremely complicated to integrate different versions of middleware from different vendors. In practice, this is almost impossible.

VMware entered the data center market for a relatively short period of time. bogomilbalkansky, senior director of product marketing of the company, said the company intends to use the enterprise operating system to open up the market, a brand new software layer. This is a control point that controls the software layer to seize many business opportunities.

IBM apparently also has a chance to win. Its power6 chip chief architect, bradmccredie, said the company is developing an extremely unique management program that brings together IBM's experience in the mainframe age, provides various management and priority transaction management functions.

Most technical experts also mentioned the software stack technology, which includes all the components required for normal software operation. Today, the software stack field has become very broad, from chips to the largest enterprise application software, almost all of IBM's technologies are integrated to ensure better collaboration with virtualization.

Microsoft has made similar efforts from another perspective. Like IBM, Microsoft's advantage is that its software already has a large number of users. Its operating system and productivity application software have become the basic platform of its virtualization strategy. Zaneadam, senior director of Microsoft virtualization strategy, said: "We are currently focusing on dynamic data centers. It not only occupies a small footprint, but also significantly improves energy efficiency ."

In the end, it is still unknown who can win in this market. It may take a long time for them to win. However, the improvement in efficiency and the change in the computing model will fundamentally change the enterprise's technology market for the first time. These changes should have happened for a long time.