From the Economist:

Just as Ford transformed efficiency when he scrapped the sheds, so too “IT has got to become an end-to-end flow of information, just like an end-to-end flow of product along an assembly line,” says Mr Larry Ellison.

What this means in practice is that Oracle will gladly replace all the different software systems now used by a typical firm—many of which cannot talk to each other without further heavy spending—with its all-singing, all-dancing e-business suite.

The present piecemeal approach to IT often means that corporate information is scattered in hundreds of databases. Finding simple facts, such as the current number of employees, can take weeks, by which time the information is often obsolete. Mr Ellison argues that the e-business suite standardises data, putting it in one database where it can be manipulated by a complete and integrated suite of applications. Only with such a “simplified IT architecture”, to use the term of art, can firms automate their business processes and react quickly to changes.

Writes ZDNet:

The good news for Linux as an operating system for the desktop -- as opposed to the server -- is that it is set to become No. 2 after Windows in the next year or so. The bad news is that its growth does not look to be as explosive as some advocates might have hoped.

One factor holding Linux back on the desktop is the lack of well-established applications, according to Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's vice president of system software. "Consumers and organisations select applications first and let that choice direct the choice of the operating environment," he said. "If, for example, a needed application is only available on Windows, the consumer or organisation will select Windows."

In the past year or so, some progress has been made towards providing Linux equivalents to common Windows applications: Ximian's Evolution mimics Outlook's look and feel, and is compatible with Exchange servers, for example, and Sun Microsystems' StarOffice can read and write Microsoft Office files. CodeWeavers' Crossover Office software even allows some Windows applications to be installed on a Linux machine.

But these solutions don't necessarily add up to desktop success, in Kusnetzky's view. "Organisations are still likely to select the most popular applications even though applications having similar capabilities exists," he argued.

According to News.com, Cisco is facing competition from Dell (no surprise) and Chinese manufacturer Huawei. It writes:

As much as Dell is a U.S. threat, Huawei, which makes all the same gear, worries Cisco overseas, especially in Asia, analysts said. And it wants to build its presence in the United States.

"Huawei may have the same long-term impact on the networking market that Toyota and Honda had on automobiles," CIBC World Markets analyst Steve Kamman said, adding however, that it will take time for the Chinese company to gain a significant U.S. foothold.

Kamman, who recently visited China, does not own Cisco stock and CIBC does not do banking work for the company.

Founded in 1988 by a former officer in the People's Liberation Army, Huawei expects 2002 sales to rise almost 25 percent to $3 billion, thanks partly to growing exports outside of Asia.

"This is a time for Huawei to enter developed countries. At this time, the economy has slowed down," company Executive Vice President Fei Min said recently at its Shenzhen, China, headquarters.

I have been mentioned in their 20th anniversary issue which pays "tribute to the people who have helped turn the Indian IT dream into reality". This is what the citation has to say:

Rajesh Jain made it to the cover story of the February 2000 issue of TIME -- Rajesh Jain taught Asia what Silicon Valley has known for a long time: going public may be the most celebrated way to cash in on the Internet, but selling out can be a sure-fire moneymaker." And he got $115 million for selling out India’s first portal site—IndiaWorld—to Sify in November 1999. A year before that, Jain set up NetCore, a Linux-based messaging software company. NetCore is now transforming itself into a company called as Emergic.

In 2003, there will also be a build-out of what John Hagel and John Seely Brown describes as the Web Services grid. They write [1 2]:

Momentum is starting to build behind Web services technology deployments. To date, these deployments have been relatively modest from a technology perspective. Many of these early deployments extend across firewalls to connect applications residing in multiple enterprises. As businesses start to reap significant savings from these early deployments, executives are becoming more interested in broader deployments of the technology to coordinate business processes and support mission-critical transactions.

This will be difficult task without a layer of robust services, such as service definition and discovery, security and access control, metering/billing, routing of messages across applications or data transformation between applications, to support these core business activities. We have termed this missing layer the “service grid.”

This service grid is analogous to the electrical power grid in that it provides a set of utilities and services to ensure reliable distribution of web services. Shared utilities within the service grid provide security, third party auditing and performance assessment and billing and payment services. The service grid also includes a set of managed services that will help to facilitate transport of messages, locating and understanding characteristics of available web services, and ensuring web services perform as required.

The basic concept is to delegate to specialized service grid utilities two key roles (1) provide the demanding performance required to connect webservices together to support mission critical business activities and (2) help web services users and providers find and connect more easily with each other. Once again, the focus is on reducing the complexity for programmers seeking to connect web services. The service grid eliminates the need to reproduce basic functionality that all connections require and makes these available as specialized, shared services. This allows connections to be established more quickly and at lower cost, but without sacrificing on performance.

Writes John Ness in Newsweek’s special “Issues 2003” edition: “The theory [of utility computing] goes like this. Customers are demanding faster service that’s better tailored to their businesses. Various tech innovations (such as grid computing) are emerging that make that possible, but those innovations run through disparate systems, languages and networks. A company’s IT department can’t bring it together, but it can pay someone to synthesize all that business IT into a commodity. True-utility status will be achieved when that commodity is as easy for customers to manage (and companies to bill for) as gas and electricity are today.”

Writing in the Economist’s “The Year in 2003”, Bill Gates takes it to its logical conclusion: “Computers, like electricity, will play a role in almost everything you do, but computing itself will no longer be a discrete experience. We will be focused on what we do width computers, not on the devices themselves. They will be all around us, essential to almost every part of our lives, but they will effectively have ‘disappeared’.”

Next Week: 2003 Expectations (continued)