Infrastructure-as-a-service

What I've been drawing up here on the board is something I've been thinking about for a while, which is "Where is technology headed for big companies and small companies?" And the way I am thinking about this now is, we will take a look back, but I'm pausing that the next great wave is something I would call "infrastructure-as-a-service."

And by that, I guess, what I mean is this notion of "utility computing." But I don't like using that buzzword because, you know, it means too many different things and I think infrastructure-as-as-service is more accurate because we started with client-server in 2000. We moved over the last few years with Web services and SOA on the software side and pay-as-you-go and software-as-a-service. We are starting to see more of this comoditization so that you don't have to really care what processor or what kind of storage device you have, but you just want to reach, you know, want a service level, quality of service of X, Y or Z. That's just beginning and I think as that grows, software-as-a-service really becomes infrastructure-as-a-service that's built on this notion that you're going to have very little human labor because that's the high cost right now, which is, there is so much complexity that human labor really breaks everything down.

We have to get to a point where we can get to infrastructure-as-a-service because it is machine automation. Machine is handling all the complexities and its grids and virtualization. There is lots of intelligence in the network and it's all policy-based so that you can just configure the service that you want to deliver you so much capacity or specific kind of software and a certain level of quality of service. That's, I believe, what we had, had in infrastructure-as-a-service. It's not going to happen overnight, but we are definitely on that path. So, get on board.