Small is Beautiful -- Or Had Better Be

For the last 15 years or so, many tech vendors who had been largely enamored of Fortune 500 clients have taken notice of small and mid-sized businesses. The need is obvious. Companies in the tech space want to keep growing as rapidly as possible because investors have come to expect it. Drop the growth rate in an industry that is traditionally seen as growing quickly, and you are suddenly lagging. But the idea of going small is spreading and fundamentally transforming high tech and maybe even the strategies necessary for success in the future.

Over on CNET, blogger James Urquhart discusses the “rethink” over cloud services as a movement away from operating systems as monolithic blocks of code that control a computer and offer a unified API for applications and toward frameworks that could offer a flexible footprint and provide only the specific services that a given piece of software needed.

He’s extending something that Chris Hoff at Cisco and others have considered — whether the virtual machine is a viable concept. Alone this would be an intriguing line of thought. If a cloud is only a bunch of old-fashioned servers hosting something, albeit at a distance, how is it really any different from what companies do today?

If that crap in the middle of the sandwich makes for inefficiency, insecurity and added cost in virtualized enterprises, imagine what it does at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer in Cloud deployments where VMs — in whatever form — are the basis for the operational models. We have these fat packaged VMs with OS overhead and attack surfaces that really don’t need to be there.

Thinking of a cloud deployment as just that — the infrastructure framework that companies can companies with application fragments to build their IT needs.

Aside from the technical intrigue of the notion, which is so compelling as to command a sense of logical inevitability, there are enormous strategic business implications. Urquhart describes vendors as once having used operating systems as “a way of distinguishing one company’s product experience from another,” but I’d suggest an additional angle. The OS was the way to lock in customers and developers so the vendor could control the interactions of those two and keep both dependent.

And that really speaks to how the industry has worked in the past: forced scale. The vendors and manufacturers wanted the biggest customers who could buy the biggest volume for the biggest profits, of course. IT went from mainframes to minis and then to PCs. Even then, the unit of work deployment was the single machine, and OS vendors wanted control over what would run and how dependent everyone would be on them.

But if the cloud does develop in this direction — and if it makes sense, you can bet you’ll see a public open-source effort to create software that would let it happen — then all bets are off in the industry. Hardware, already a commodity on the PC side, continues its race for every category of machine. Vendors eventually no longer have a lock-in, and even the cloud vendors can’t keep things as proprietary, other than, perhaps, services that allow some of the interactivity to happen more easily, effectively, or transparently.

Businesses used to look to scale up. Now they have to scale down and out.

Image via stock.xchng user svilen001, site standard license.