Disruptive Technology free essay sample

Disruptive Technology Abstract The objective of this project is to explain the emergence of disruptive technology in the IT industry that will enable and help the organizations growth in a cost effective manner. One of the hottest topics in today’s IT corridors is the uses and benefits of virtualization technologies. IT companies all over the globe are executing virtualization for a diversity of business requirements, driven by prospects to progress server flexibility and decrease operational costs. InfoTech Solutions being dominant IT solution provider can be broadly benefited by implementing the virtualization. This paper is intended to provide the complete details of virtualization, its advantages and strategies for SMEs to migrate. Introduction 2009 IT buzz word is ‘Virtualization’. Small, medium and large business organizations seriously started to re organize their e-business strategy towards the successful disruptive technology of virtualization. Virtualization of business applications permits IT operations in organizations of all sizes to decrease costs, progress IT services and to reduce risk management. The most remarkable cost savings are the effect of diminishing hardware, utilization of space and energy, as well as the productivity gains leads to cost savings. In the Small business sector virtualization can be defined as a technology that permits application workloads to be maintained independent of host hardware. Several applications can share a sole, physical server. Workloads can be rotated from one host to another without any downtime. IT infrastructure can be managed as a pool of resources, rather than a collection of physical devices. Disruptive Technology Disruptive Technology or disruptive Innovation is an innovation that makes a product or service better by reducing the price or changing the market dramatically in a way it does not expect. Christensen (2000) stated that ‘‘disruptive technologies are typically simpler, cheaper, and more reliable and convenient than established technologies’’ (p. 192). Before we do any research on disruptive technology it is useful and necessary to summarize the Christensen’s notion of disruptive technology. Christensen was projected as â€Å"guru† by the business (Scherreik, 2000). His work has been broadly referred by scholars or researchers working in different disciplines and topics like the development of new product, strategies like marketing and management and so on. In his book â€Å"The Innovator’s Dilemma,† (Christensen 1997) Christensen had done significant observations about the circumstances under which companies or organizations that are established lose market to an entrant that was referred as disruptive technology. This theory became extremely influential in the management decision making process (Vaishnav, 2008). Christensen’s arguments, from the academic references (Christensen 1992; Christensen and Rosenbloom 1995; Christensen, Suarez et al. 1996) instead of looking in to his famous paperbacks (Christensen 1997; Christensen and Raynor 2003), explains that the entrant might have more advantage then the incumbent and it requires the understanding of three important forces: technological capability (Henderson and Clark 1990), organizational dynamics (Anderson and Tushman 1990), and value (Christensen and Rosenbloom 1995). He argued further that company’s competitive strategy and mainly its earlier choices of markets to serve, decides its perceptions of economic value in new technology, and improves the rewards it will expect to obtain through innovation. Christensen (1995) classifies new technology into two types: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technology depends on rising improvements to an already established technology, at the same time Disruptive technology is new, and replaces an established technology unexpectedly. The disruptive technologies may have lack of refinement and often may have performance problems because these are fresh and may not have a verified practical application yet. It takes a lot of time and energy to create something new and innovative that will significantly influence the way that things are done. Most of the organizations are concerned about maintaining and sustaining their products and technologies instead of creating something new and different that may better the situation. They will make change and minor modifications to improve the current product. These changes will give a bit of new life to those products so that they can increase the sales temporarily and keeps the technology a bit longer. Disruptive technologies generally emerge from outside to the mainstream. For example the light bulb was not invented by the candle industry seeking to improve the results. Normally owners of recognized technology organizations tend to focus on their increased improvements to their existing products and try to avoid potential threat to their business (Techcom, 2004). Compared to sustaining products, disruptive technologies take steps into various directions, coming up with ideas that would work against with products in the current markets and could potentially replace the mainstream products that are being used. So it is not considered as disruption, but considered as innovation. It is not only replacing, but improving ahead what we have now making things enhanced, quicker, and mostly cooler. Either it may be disruptive or innovative; technologies are changing the â€Å"future wave† in to reality and slowly started occupying the world. On one hand, the warning of disruption makes incumbents suspicious about losing the market, while emerging new entrants confident of inventing the next disruptive technology. Perhaps, such expects and worries produce more competition in the market place. It seems that every year there is a laundry list of products and technologies that are going to â€Å"change the world as we know it. † One that seems to have potential to achieve the title of a disruptive technology is something that has been around for a while now: virtualization. Gartner (2008) describes disruptive technology as â€Å"causing major change in the accepted way of doing things, including business models, processes, revenue streams, industry dynamics and consumer behaviors†. Virtualization is one of the top ten disruptive technologies listed by Gartner (Gartner. com). This virtualization technology is not new to the world. As computers turn into more common though, it became obvious that simply time-sharing a single computer was not always ideal because the systems can be misused intentionally or unintentionally and that may crash the entire system to alt. To avoid this multi system concept emerged. This multi system concept provided a lot of advantages in the organizational environment like Privacy, security to data, Performance and isolation. For example in organization culture it is required to keep certain activities performing from different systems. A testing application run in a system sometimes may halt the system or crash the syst em completely. So it is obvious to run the application in a separate system that won’t affect the net work. On the other hand placing different applications in the same system may reduce the performance of the system as they access the same available system resources like memory, network input/output, Hard disk input/output and priority scheduling (Barham, at,. el, 2003). The performance of the system and application will be greatly improved if the applications are placed in different systems so that they can have its own resources. It is very difficult for most of the organization to invest on multiple systems and at times it is hard to keep all the systems busy to its full potential and difficult to maintain and also the asset value keeps depreciating. So investing in multiple systems becomes waste at times, however having multi systems obviously has its own advantages. Considering this cost and waste, IBM introduced the first virtual machine in 1960 that made one system to be as it was multiple. In the starting, this fresh technology allowed individuals to run multiple applications at the same time to increase the performance of person and computer to do multitask abilities. Along with this multi tasking factor created by virtualization, it was also a great money saver. The multitasking ability of virtualization that allowed computers to do more than one task at a time become more valuable to companies, so that they can leverage their investments completely (VMWare. com). Virtualization is a hyped and much discussed topic recently due to its potential characteristics. Firstly it has capacity to use the computer resources in a better potential way maximizing the company’s hardware investment. It is estimated that only 25% of the total resources are utilized in an average data center. By virtualization large number older systems can be replaced by a highly modern, reliable and scalable enterprise servers reduce the hardware and infrastructure cost significantly. It is not just server consolidation, virtualization offers much more than that like the ability to suspend, resume, checkpoint, and migrate running Chesbrough (1999a, 1999b). It is exceptionally useful in handling the long running jobs. If a long running job is assigned to a virtual machine with checkpoints enabled, in any case it stops or hangs, it can be restarted from where it stopped instead of starting from the beginning. The main deference of today’s virtualization compared to the older mainframe age is that it can be allocated any of the service’s choice location and is called as of Distributed Virtual Machines that opens a whole lot of possibilities like monitoring of network, validating security policy and the distribution of content (Peterson et, al, 2002). The way virtual technology breaks the single operating system boundaries is what made it to be a significant part of technology that leads in to the disruptive technology group. It allows the users to run multiple applications in multiple operating systems on a single computer simultaneously. (VMWare. com, 2009) Basically, this new move will have a single physical server and that hardware can be made in to software that will use all the available hardware resources to create a virtual mirror of it. The replications created can be used as software based computers to run multiple applications at the same time. These software based computers will have the complete attributes like RAM, CPU and NIC interface of the physical computers. The only different is that there will be only one system instead of multiple running different operating systems (VMWare. com, 2009) called guest machines. Virtual Machine Monitor Guest virtual machines can be hosted by a method called as Virtual Machine Monitor or VMM. This should go hand-in-hand with virtual machines. In realty, VMM is referred as the host and the hosted virtual machines are referred as guests. The physical resources required by the guests are offered by the software layer of the VMM or host. The following figure represents the relationship between VMM and guests. The VMM supplies the required virtual versions of processor, system devices such as I/O devices, storage, memory, etc. It also presents separation between the virtual machines and it hosts so that issues in one cannot effect another. As per the research conducted by Springboard Research study recently, the spending related to virtualization software and services will reach to 1. 5 billion US dollar by the end of 2010. The research also adds that 50% of CIOs interested in deploying virtualization to overcome the issues like poor performance system’s low capacity utilization and to face the challenges of developing IT infrastructure. TheInfoPro, a research company states that more than 50% of new servers installed were based on virtualization and this number is expected to grow up to 80% by the end of 2012. V irtualization will be the maximum impact method modifying infrastructure and operations by 2012. In reference to Gartner, Inc. 008, Virtualization will renovate how IT is bought, planed, deployed and managed by the companies. As a result, it is generating a fresh wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in market negotiation and consolidation over the coming years. The market share for PC virtualization is also booming rapidly. The growth is expected to be 660 million compared to 5 million in till 2007. Virtualization strategy for mid-sized businesses Virtualization has turn out to be a significant IT strategy for small and mid-sized business (SMEs) organizations. It not only offers the cost savings, but answers business continuity issues and allows IT managers to: †¢Manage and reduce the downtime caused due to the planed hardware maintenance that will reduce the down time resulting higher system availability. †¢Test, investigate and execute the disaster recovery plans. †¢Secure the data, as well as non-destructive backup and restore Processes †¢Check the stability and real-time workloads In these competitive demanding times, SME businesses organizations require to simplify the IT infrastructure and cut costs. However, with various storage, server and network requirements, and also sometimes might not have sufficient physical space to store and maintain systems, the company’s chances can be restricted by both less physical space and budget concerns. The virtualization can offer solutions for these kind issues and SMEs can significantly benefit not only from server consolidation, but also with affordable business continuity. What is virtualization for mid-sized businesses? In the Small business sector virtualization can be defined as a technology that permits application workloads to be maintained independent of host hardware. Several applications can share a sole, physical server. Workloads can be rotated from one host to another without any downtime. IT infrastructure can be managed as a pool of resources, rather than a collection of physical devices. It is assumed that the virtualization is just for large enterprises. But in fact it is not. It is a widely-established technology that decreases hardware requirements, increases use of hardware resources, modernizes management and diminish energy consumption. Economics of virtualization for the midmarket The research by VMWare. om (2009) shows that the SMEs invested on virtualization strategy has received their return of investment (ROI) in less than year. In certain cases, this can be less than seven months with the latest Intel Xeon 5500 series processors http://www-03. ibm. com/systems/resources/6412_Virtualization_Strategy_-_US_White_Paper_-_Apr_24-09. pdf [accessed on 04/09/09] The below image explains how the virtualization simplified a large utility company infrastructure with 1000 systems with racks and cables to a dramatically simpler form. Source : http://www-03. ibm. om/systems/resources/6412_Virtualization_Strategy_-_US_White_Paper_-_Apr_24-09. pdf [accessed on 04/09/09] Virtualization SME advantages 1. Virtualization and management suite presents a stretchable and low -cost development platform and an environment with high capability. 2. Virtualization provides the facility to rotate virtual machines that are live between physical hosts. This ability numerous advantages like business continuity, recovery in disaster, balancing of workload, and even energy-savings by permitting running applications to be exchanged between physical servers without disturbing the service. . Virtualization can help you take full advantage of the value of IT Pounds: †¢Business alertness in varying markets †¢A flexible IT infrastructure that can scale with business growth †¢ High level performance that can lever the majority of d emanding applications †¢ An industry-standard platform architecture with intellectual management tools †¢ Servers with enterprise attributes—regardless of their size or form factor 4. Virtualization can help you to advance IT services: †¢The provision to maintain the workloads rapidly by setting automatic maintenance process that can be configured to weeks, days or even to inutes. †¢Improve IT responsiveness to business needs †¢Down times can be eliminate by shifting the †¢To a great extent decrease, even eliminate unplanned downtime. †¢Reducing costs in technical support, training and mainte ¬nance. Conclusion: This is the right time for Small and mid-sized businesses like InfoTech Solutions to implement a virtualization strategy. Virtualization acts as a significant element of the IT strategy for businesses of all sizes, with a wide range of benefits and advantages for all sized businesses. It helps InfoTech Solutions to construct an IT infrastructure with enterprise-class facilities and with a with a form factor of Return Of Investment. It is expected that more than 80% of organizations will implement virtualization by the end of 2012. 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