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IP.4.IT Special Coverage: The "Google-ization" of IT

Posted by Rich Karpinski on November 16, 2005

From the kick-off, the spotlight was on the next wave of big-picture changes that are collecting to transform enterprise IT, much in the same way the Internet and Web brought new capabilities--and possibilities--to IT a decade before.

Opening keynote speaker, consultant and author Paul Strassman (when he wasn't reality-checking the enterprise-centric audience with tales of attacks on a DNS root server he was once tasked with overseeing) urged attendees to dive headlong into today's new world in which "computer-centric solutions are being replaced by network-centric services."

Although Google gets a lot of attention for its search algorithms and bushels-of-cash advertising-based business model, Strassman pointed to the company as the world's first mega-scale example of a true distributed, service-oriented network architecture based on easy-to-understand, published interface standards.

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"Google serves as an early prototype of what is possible," said Strassman, pointing particularly at the ability for developers to take multiple Google APIs--such as for search and maps--and "mash" them up to create altogether new applications. Such an approach not only yields innovative new apps but represents a major shift in the cost-structure of IT. "This is something way beyond the current capability of most applications," he said.

Added Strassman: "It took us $2 trillion and 50 years of computing to get where we are today. It's going to take another 10 to 25 years and $20 trillion to create a global real-time [network computing] environment" that will be the major economic force of the next century.