Darren Wesemann Blog

First there was the virtualization of people talking to each other as telephonic communications connected others via a “cloud” and the service of the telephone came into being. At some point data communications also went into the cloud and became virtual, especially with the advent of packet protocols, not to mention the Crown Jewel of them all, IP, which truly virtualized data communications as that cloud became the public Internet. Then, there was the wireless virtualization, such that connectivity to the cloud became unwired and then location all of the sudden was irrelevant, (in fact a characteristic of virtualization is making certain things irrelevant, i.e. location, format, etc.). Arguably the asynchronous nature of event models allowed time to become irrelevant, (as synchronous communications have a dependency on sequence).

And the cloud keeps growing. Software as a Service (SaaS) is the virtualization of software, where binaries and the installations of them become irrelevant. The subscription model is interesting, it’s turning software into an easy monthly service, like any public utility, for example.

So where’s this all going? Hardly slowing down, let alone standing still, it’s accelerating. In March of this year Amazon.com launched the Simple Storage Service (or S3), which is a metered disk service (in the cloud of course), hardly the first hosted storage capability out there, however is just so virtual, so easy and it’s truly a service. Okay, okay, so storage isn’t the sexiest thing, but in July, the same company announces Simple Queuing Service (or SQS), which enables true virtual services. The framework for this is called the Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), which is a web service that provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud”. Go here for Amazon’s full description: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011.

Is there no end to the trend of virtualization? Of course not, but that’s good. With each move forward, software and computing gets easier, cheaper and more useful. Although, I’m not sure the virtual computing is as cost effective as it may seam. Check out the pricing on the page at the URL above. It says its $0.10 per “instance-hour”, is basically $72 per month (relative to a 1.7Ghz CPU, 1.75GB RAM and 160GB hard drive), mind you that’s excluding internet access which is an additional $0.20 per Gigabyte. A little pricey, and there are cheaper hosting models out there. However, as all things like this do, it’ll get way cheaper over time. This stuff is leading edge and it’s in its infancy, so give it a little time.

Clearly virtualized computing, communications, software, and many other areas are are maturing in availability and importance. SunGard believes in the virtualization of software as services. We view this as a growing trend in distributing software, it’s a far better way in fact to distribute software. It’s more flexible, quicker and fosters integrated “composite solutions” meeting business needs more closely than monolithically installing siloed binaries that don’t interoperate. SunGard’s SaaS effort is revolutionary, at least for the financial services industry. Over the course of the next 12 months, more and more of this vision will be revealed, with each passing parts of the SunGard virtualized software delivery (or marketplace) for financial services will be exposed. Stay tuned…