Viewpoint--breaking the cycle of consumption with efficient software.

Suppliers of IT and IT systems tell you that there is valuable information in the data your business produces. They tell you of value in understanding your customer better and understanding the impact of market influences on their buying behaviour faster. In order for you to realise that value, it will take time, money and substantial effort from your business. On the other hand, your suppliers will derive their value much more quickly and therein lies the tension of the IT industry-market relationship.

Every new IT system implemented generates more data to be recorded (for longer and longer periods), and requires further and larger systems to analyse the data in order to derive that promised business value. It is a never ending, upwards spiralling pattern which locks in small and large business alike. Faster than the capacity of technology can increase, the appetite is fuelled. This is the way it has to be, otherwise those massive IT suppliers cannot meet their ever aggressive targets and Wall Street expectations.

The 'more for more' argument is easy to sell. Al1 your suppliers are aligned to it--the hardware manufacturers, the software vendors and the consultancies or systems integration houses are all on the same upwards track. It makes easy sense, and doesn't rock the boat. It will carry on forever. Or will it? Indeed, can it? In Canary Wharf, for instance, it certainly cannot. The power supply network is already at its limit. No new system can be deployed without decommissioning one first.

This issue exposes the ultimate problem for continued expansion of IT systems--the amount of electricity used to power the swelling ranks of servers, and, even more alarmingly, the power used to cool them. It is possible to organise your data differently, so that it uses less storage and less processing power, to deliver higher performance and better business flexibility. But that sounds hard to believe--or easy to doubt. When building high-rise buildings, it became apparent that using the same old tower-block model of a central supporting pillar had limitations--the base of the pillar had to get wider and wider to support a taller building until no more floor space was added by adding a new floor. The tallest buildings are now architected with 'exoskeletons' to provide strength through structure, rather than just brute force.

Most large data analysis systems are still being constructed with the equivalent of the old-fashioned tower-block--an RDBMS--which explodes data storage and processing power demands so that smaller and smaller increments in performance and effectiveness are gained at greater and greater expense, and air-conditioning and power supply demands. The RDBMS was the great mainstay of online transaction processing--enabling many users to edit and maintain individual customer or transaction records--but when it comes to deriving business value from the analysis of many millions of these records with rapidly changing questions, it just can't do it efficiently, and the cost-performance curve hits a brick wall.

As organisations' information needs rocket, the high-rise IT systems required to provide the desired business agility need a new architecture to support them.

The results are that elusive 'more for less'--truly a step change in performance and cost (increased and decreased respectively). But, as with any disruptive technology, there is a rub. The software has been produced which can deliver these promises, but to whose cost? Your hardware supplier and managed service partner whose business models are based on ever increasing numbers of servers, ever increasing volumes of data and data centres to manage will surely not be the first proponents of such change.

Alf Franklin, Sybase UK

www.sybase.com