Steve Riley, Microsoft Senior Security Strategist provided a keynote at DevConnections in Las Vegas.
The topic was, ‘Next 10 years of IT’.
The keynote was very unique and thought provoking, so I would like to share some thoughts.
Green IT
How many servers do you have in your server room? What is their utilization?
Personally, over my last few clients I know of a handful of servers that running less than 20% CPU utilization. Is this efficient?
If these machines where VM’d they could be reallocated and share resources on a single box.
This is a very important strategy in an area where businesses have growing concerns with their bottom line as the market tightens.
Streamline IT
In an era with SOA taking the stage, it is very possible program developers will only write services.
Information workers can use tools like WorkFlow (WF) to connect single responsibility services, this tool will allow them to assign business rules and logic.
A lot of productivity is lost explaining business logic / rules to programmers. If we could provide our business users with the tools to write their own rules, there will be signification productivity gains.
Consolidation of Vendors and Services
We did a quick review of hardware vendors from the 80’s to today; there were 20+ server vendors from this area. Today there are less than 10.
Is this because these companies could not adapt to change? Or they could not innovate?
IT must be Adaptive to Change
We did a quick review of the mainframe era, how IBM ruled the industry; soon thereafter, the PC came available.
It was desirable for end users to use personal devices, the mainframe systems could not adapt, therefore were left behind.
IBM ended up being left behind and lost significant market share.
How do we predict the future?
By looking at the past; history tends to repeat. We need to be agile and open to new ideas.
Microsoft has announced the launch Patterns and Practices for SharePoint at DevConnections Las Vegas.
http://www.codeplex.com/spg
The MOSS P&P launch affirms that MOSS will be around for some time.
Microsoft has been pushing MOSS as their portal solution; Intranet and Internet. It is becoming clear that MOSS is becoming much more than a portal solution.
The director of SharePoint, Thomas Rizzo, wouldn’t comment on the release date of SP1 but he did recommend that all SharePoint users should install the infrastructure update.
Recently I have been working on a Business Intelligence (BI) planning team; we are looking to migrate to SQL 2008 as a BI platform.
A part of our process was to have a webcast with some Microsoft team members to showcase some of the features with company stakeholders.
Our agenda was to discuss reporting services in particular (SSRS). When it came time for the webcast, the demonstration focused more on Performance Point 2007 than SSRS.
One of the requirements for Performance Point is that it must run on SharePoint 2007.
To summarize, in order to get to ‘the Microsoft recommend BI platform’ you need to purchase.
1. SQL 2008
2. MOSS
3. Performance Point 2007
I think it is great that all 3 of these products work well together, but that also means our budget and resource requirements multiply by 3x plus.