INDUSTRY

The computing industry experienced major demands for performance in 2006. Liquid Computing expects to see major shifts in the approach to computing and the role servers take in supporting these performance demands in 2007. Here are Liquid Computing’s industry, business and technology predictions for 2007: 1. Computing and Communications Collision Computing and communications companies will become more like each other. The current limitations of COTS will require companies such as Cisco, IBM, Juniper, and Sun to start delivering turn-key offerings that are easier to maintain, have increased performance, and support maximum utilization. 2. Sale of Service Instead of buying servers and switches, more business people will turn to hosted offerings paying for Units of Service; Salesforce, IBM and Oracle are already heading in this direction. The ubiquity of broadband in business will be the key driver as well as the deployment of more economical infrastructures. 3. Vast Virtualization Virtualization will expand to include the entire set of computing and communications resources. Software services will be deployed across a fully virtualized data center and commodity servers and third-party switches will be replaced by new technologies that virtualize the hardware, network, and computing space.