I'd like to propose a simple thought experiment. Consider this question:

What if computing is free?

While we're at it, assume that scale is always sufficient for the problem at hand, latency is acceptable, your applications always work, and that operations are cheap enough to be in the noise.

What's the Point?

The point of this is simple enough. One answer to this thought experiment was Google ... and that worked out pretty well.

Google would not be possible without commodity infrastructure, and apps that assume that they have (more or less) free, unlimited, access to that infrastructure.

Same for most of web 2.0 - after all, most bigger sites are (very loosely) built around some of the same principles. While there are some notables exceptions (EBAY) and many fundamental differences exist, the common meta-trend is that commodity is the right choice for the biggest, gnarliest, most demanding applications..

Now for the Enterprise

Yet that thought has not really begun to penetrate most enterprises. Kind-of commodity may be OK in a fairly stateless web tier, and perhaps for some occasional modeling or research apps, but elsewhere the closest are racks of expensive, heavily-managed blade farms.

Those blade farms may help with operations, but since those farms are normally driven from the operations side of the enterprise, they don't mean much to the apps. Consequently, these farms haven't done much for scale for most apps.

Plus they're still expensive.

Of course, they ARE most definitely commodity when compared with the Z-class mainframes that still dominate the batch settlement / customer service operations that are so prevalent in enterprises the world over.

A Financial Services Example

We have a financial services customer who decided to instantiate this thought experiment - they've implemented their settlement infrastructure on commodity. Commodity organized by an application fabric (ours!), so that it is reliable, arbitrarily scalable, and very cheap to operate.

The results? They're matching industry norms for settlement performance on Z-class mainframes with a handful of commodity boxes ... and they can keep scaling for a few hundred bucks at a time. Plus it's reliable, and never gets more expensive to operate.

That will change their industry.

Back to the Thought Experiment

Over the past couple of years I keep running into organization after organization that has existing operations built on the constraints of expensive, heavy, traditional computing. Constrained by state, constrained by the data tier, constrained by I/O, constrained by budgets ... but mostly constrained by human nature, by organization inertia, by just thinking about the problem the way it's always been thought about.

Whole industries, for that matter.

Time to change that - ask yourself, what if computing is free?