Nick Carr's "The Big Switch"

Nick's publisher was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his new book a couple of months ago, and I ran through it in a couple of days. Nick's an easy read, and  I recommend getting a copy now that it is generally available.

It's really two books in one. The first is about the move to utility computing and historical analogies to how electric utilities and grids were birthed. The second is a series of essays on the social and moral and policy implications of our digital world. I enjoyed the second part far more than the first - it is the reason I read his blog on a regular basis.

When it comes to utility computing, I love the concept. But reality bites me with every transaction I help with in the field. The big software and outsourcing vendors just are not ready to support it as I have written before:

"EDS has over 100,000 employees. The average Fortune 500 CIO has 500 IT employees. Infosys has delivered over 18,000 projects using its GDM. The average CIO has done fewer than 10.  Microsoft spent $ 6 billion in R&D last year. The average Fortune  500 CIO's total IT budget (not just on software) is less than $ 50 m. Yet vendors cannot price their products or deliver performance on a utility scale model? How much more scale do they need?"

More recently, SAP announces its SaaS concept, BBD, but less than 5% of tis incumbent customer base will likely qualify as I wrote here.

In his enthusiasm for the concept, Nick chooses to gloss over that minor point in the book. Without that caveat, his enthusiasm makes it sound as if it is just around the corner - it would be the equivalent of homeowners giving  up their generators, only to be horrified to find the electric grid is not really efficient. And in this utility game, there are no regulators to control economics.

The "second" book, I found thought provoking as he explores privacy, security and "market of one" opportunities and risks. He does not have many answers - but I found that the enjoyable part. Rather than a technologist's precision his social commentary leaves the big questions hanging - and haunting.

Twofer...can't go wrong...enjoy.

Comments

[Damon Edwards]

Hi Vinnie,

Your perception that something is wrong with the current promise of utility computing is spot on... and a refreshing view in a sea of pundits who wax on about it being "just around the corner".

But I would add to your analysis that the root problem isn't scale. The problem is that the business visions have jumped light years ahead of their internal capability to "deliver". Simply put, the technical tooling and technical processes are woefully inadequate. Poke around in how the large outsourcers, managed services providers, or even large e-commerce and SaaS providers manage their infrastructure and applications and I think you'll be shocked at how manual and ad-hoc things really are.

A good metaphor to use is manufacturing. The business minds behind the utility computing push are talking about things that are the equivalent to "mass customization" and "just in time delivery" while the technology and process model available to deliver those dreams is little more than the master craftsman and apprentice model of the pre-Ford Motors days (or maybe an early Ford assembly line, to be fair).

There are some interesting things under the radar in the open source community like ControlTier (plug) and Puppet, but the general interest in the problem space seems to be limited to the relatively limited pool of engineers who have tried to scale significant operations and know that a better way is out there. Unfortunately most of the technical fanfare in this area seems to be focused around "sexier" things like faster grid fabrics and hardware vendor wars. In general, automating and optimizing technical operations is a neglected field.

And for the time being, forget about help from the big 4 systems management vendors. Their state of the art is not much more than 15 year old Desktop/LAN management technology wrapped with a new marketing veneer.

So this is a problem that isn't going away soon and is a real impediment to all who don't have high profit margins or large pools of cheap labor to throw at the problem.

-Damon
http://dev2ops.blogspot.com/2008/01/nick-carrs-big-switch-big-dream.html

[Bert Armijo]

>>> EDS has over 100,000 employees

Yes Vinnie, and they markup everyone of those employees. IMHO, that's why you're looking in the wrong place. There has simply been no economic reason for large outsourcers or equipment vendors to build or implement the powerplants Nick writes about. They've made billions selling copies of the same systems to every CIO.

The future of IT is no longer being defined in the Fortune 500, but rather on the internet where scale has created issues that never existed in corporate IT. As a result large internet operators have been forced to build their own infrastructure systems. Google's of course is legendary and Amazon is now trying to sell theirs by the slice. They, however, are not the only ones. Yahoo, Microsoft and eBay have done the same. Facebook will have to as well if they're to continue growing. We at 3tera have also built an infrastructure system for utility computing and there are a few other startups working on them as well.

These systems are the power stations Nick writes about, and many applications you use every day are already running on them.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Bert, thanks,,,I am generous on my blog to amazon, Google, folks like Joyent and your firm...my consulting clients are big companies though, and IBM, HP, EDS, CSC, SAP etc are not disappearing...and it would be naive to pretend they are. Till they catch religion we have to be a bit cautious