Uptime Home Now, Let's Make IT Invisible Achieving a Lean, Green IT Machine Data Center Virtualization in Action

Blade computing and virtualization are two of the hottest trends in the server market. Learn how these maturing technologies combine to deliver "Virtualization 2.0," helping your business deliver higher levels of availability, dynamic scalability, and better levels of IT service. Download your free copy of IDC's white paper, Egenera: Virtualization for the Dynamic Data Center, sponsored by Egenera, July 2007.

Egenera Expands Processing Blade Family with Four New Blades Based on Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 7300 Series Egenera announced it will expand its Egenera® Processing Blade™ (pBlade™) module family with four new offerings based on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 7350 processor. The new pBlades will include 16, 32, 64 and 96GB memory configurations, representing Egenera's largest memory offering to date.  Read this press release Egenera Signs OEM Agreement with VMware Under the terms of the agreement, Egenera BladeFrame® system customers will be able to purchase VMware Infrastructure 3 solutions and support from Egenera and its resellers beginning in Q4 2007.  Read this press release

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum September 24-25, 2007 New York City, NY Breakout Session "Vendor Crossfire:x86 Server Virtualization" Panelist:  Vern Brownell SAP TechEd October 1-5, 2007 Mandalay Bay Las Vegas, NV See Egenera in Microsoft's Booth #10 TechTarget Virtualization Seminar November 15, 2007 New York City, NY

Now, Let's Make IT Invisible

by Nicholas Carr

In 1950, Bank of America launched an ambitious effort to automate its bookkeeping. The project came to fruition ten years later when, in a televised extravaganza hosted by Ronald Reagan, the bank unveiled its Electronic Recording Machine Accounting computer, fondly known as ERMA.

The computer proved a competitive boon.
It allowed the bank to expand its network of branches, and hence its market share, much more quickly and cheaply than its competitors, who still maintained accounts manually. The successful rollout of the system inaugurated an era of massive investment in computer hardware and software by the financial industry—an era that continues to this day. It's estimated that financial service companies spend more than $350 billion on information technology every year.

Unfortunately, little of that money creates the kind of strategic advantage that Bank of America gained. Most of today's spending goes toward maintaining and upgrading existing systems, ensuring data security and regulatory compliance, and matching the technological capabilities of competitors. A 2002 McKinsey Global Institute study of banks in the United States, Germany, and France concluded that "most IT investments are now simply costs of doing business and not differentiating."

Many financial institutions, in fact, now find IT more of a burden than a boon. They've become bogged down in the many complex systems they've built up over the decades. Incompatibilities impede the sharing of data. Outdated custom applications lock employees into inflexible old processes. System conflicts complicate mergers and acquisitions.

But there's good news. Thanks to cheap, standardized components and broadband data networks, a whole new model of IT supply is becoming possible. Through rapidly advancing technologies like virtualization on the hardware side and hosted applications on the software side, companies are beginning to turn their fragmented, incompatible systems into a flexible, centralized utility that can efficiently deliver data and applications in many different forms to many different users simultaneously.

Already, we're seeing innovative institutions beginning to capitalize on the new utility model. Wachovia is using grid computing to tap into the processing power lying dormant in its existing computers. Scotiabank is reducing hardware and maintenance costs by replacing the PCs at its branches with inexpensive thin-client terminals, delivering applications over the Internet from central servers.

These are early examples, but they indicate the kinds of benefits that the technologies of utility computing can deliver. As the underlying technologies continue to improve, a more radical consolidation of IT infrastructure will become possible. In many cases, companies will simply buy the basic computing capabilities they require from outside IT utilities, freeing up both capital and management time.

With its intense transaction-processing requirements and its large pools of capital, the financial industry was the pioneer of the early computerization of commerce. In coming years, it can be a trailblazer once again. It can lead business into a new world where computers serve employees and customers rather than frustrate them—a world where information technology is flexible, efficient and largely invisible.

Nicholas Carr, the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, is the author of Does IT Matter? His next book, The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny, will be published in December.

You are invited to meet Nicholas Carr at one of three events coming up in October.  He will be the featured speaker at grand opening events for SAVVIS' new data centers in Piscataway , NJ on October 11, 2007, Santa, Clara, Ca. on October 18, 2007, and Northern Virginia on October 23, 2007.  Mingle with Carr and local tech and business professionals at the event celebrating the expansion of business and technology in the region.   For more information and to register, go to http://go.savvis.net/tour

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