What are the components of IT infrastructure?

IT infrastructure today is composed of seven major components. Figure 5.8 illustrates these infrastructure components and the major vendors within each component category. These components constitute investments that must be coordinated with one another to provide the firm with a coherent infrastructure.

In the past, technology vendors supplying these components offered pur­chasing firms a mixture of incompatible, proprietary, partial solutions that could not work with other vendor products. Increasingly, vendor firms have been forced to cooperate in strategic partnerships with one another in order to keep their customers. For instance, a hardware and services provider such as IBM cooperates with all the major enterprise software providers, has strategic relationships with system integrators, and promises to work with whichever data management products its client firms wish to use (even though it sells its own database management software called DB2).

Another big change is that companies are moving more of their IT infra­structure to the cloud or to outside services, owning and managing much less on their premises. Firms’ IT infrastructure will increasingly be an amalgam of components and services that are partially owned, partially rented or licensed, partially located on site, and partially supplied by external vendors or cloud services.

1. Computer Hardware Platforms

Firms worldwide are expected to spend $704 billion on computer hardware de­vices in 2018, including mainframes, servers, PCs, tablets, and smartphones. All these devices constitute the computer hardware platform for corporate (and personal) computing worldwide.

Most business computing has taken place using microprocessor chips manufactured or designed by Intel Corporation and, to a lesser extent, AMD Corporation. Intel and AMD processors are often referred to as “i86″ processors because the original IBM PCs used an Intel 8086 processor and all the Intel (and AMD) chips that followed are downward compatible with this processor. (For instance, you should be able to run a software application designed 10 years ago on a new PC you bought yesterday.)

The computer platform changed dramatically with the introduction of mo­bile computing devices, from the iPod in 2001 to the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. Worldwide, 2 billion people use smartphones. You can think of these devices as a second computer hardware platform, one that is consumer device-driven.

Mobile devices are not required to perform as many tasks as computers in the first computer hardware platform, so they consume less power, and gener­ate less heat. Processors for mobile devices are manufactured by a wide range of firms, including Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm, using an architecture de­signed by ARM Holdings.

Mainframes have not disappeared. They continue to be used to reliably and securely handle huge volumes of transactions, for analyzing very large
quantities of data, and for handling large workloads in cloud computing centers. The mainframe is still the digital workhorse for banking and tele­communications networks that are often running software programs that are older and require a specific hardware platform. However, the number of providers has dwindled to one: IBM. IBM has also repurposed its main­frame systems so they can be used as giant servers for enterprise networks and corporate websites. A single IBM mainframe can run thousands of instances of Linux or Windows Server software and is capable of replac­ing thousands of smaller servers (see the discussion of virtualization in Section 5-3).

2. Operating System Platforms

The leading operating systems for corporate servers are Microsoft Windows Server, Unix, and Linux, an inexpensive and robust open source relative of Unix. Microsoft Windows Server is capable of providing enterprise-wide operat­ing system and network services and appeals to organizations seeking Windows- based IT infrastructures. Unix and Linux are scalable, reliable, and much less expensive than mainframe operating systems. They can also run on many dif­ferent types of processors. The major providers of Unix operating systems are IBM, HP, and Oracle-Sun, each with slightly different and partially incompatible versions.

Nearly 90 percent of PCs use some form of the Microsoft Windows operating system for managing the resources and activities of the computer. However, there is now a much greater variety of client operating systems than in the past, with new operating systems for computing on handheld mobile digital devices or cloud-connected computers.

Google’s Chrome OS provides a lightweight operating system for cloud computing using a web-connected computer. Programs are not stored on the user’s computer but are used over the Internet and accessed through the Chrome web browser. User data reside on servers across the Internet. Android is an open source operating system for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. It has become the most popular smartphone platform world­wide, competing with iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Conventional client operating system software is de­signed around the mouse and keyboard but increasingly is becoming more natural and intuitive by using touch technology. iOS, the operating system for the phenomenally popular Apple iPad and iPhone, features a multitouch interface, where users employ one or more fingers to manipulate objects on a screen without a mouse or keyboard. Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Windows 8, which run on tablets as well as PCs, have multitouch capabilities, as do many Android devices.

3. Enterprise Software Applications

Firms worldwide are expected to spend about $389 billion in 2018 on software for enterprise applications that are treated as components of IT infrastructure. The largest providers of enterprise application software are SAP and Oracle. Also included in this category is middleware software supplied by vendors such as IBM and Oracle for achieving firmwide integration by

linking the firm’s existing application systems. Microsoft is attempting to move into the lower ends of this market by focusing on small and medium­sized businesses.

4. Data Management and Storage

Enterprise database management software is responsible for organizing and managing the firm’s data so that they can be efficiently accessed and used.

The leading database software providers are IBM (DB2), Oracle, Microsoft (SQL Server), and SAP Sybase (Adaptive Server Enterprise). MySQL is a Linux open source relational da­tabase product now owned by Oracle Corporation, and Apache Hadoop is an open source software framework for managing very large data sets.

5. Networking/Telecommunications Platforms

Companies worldwide are expected to spend $1.43 trillion for telecommunica­tions services in 2018 (Gartner, Inc., 2018). Windows Server is predominantly used as a local area network operating system, followed by Linux and Unix. Large, enterprise-wide area networks use some variant of Unix. Most local area networks, as well as wide area enterprise networks, use the TCP/IP protocol suite as a standard.

Cisco and Juniper Networks are leading networking hardware providers. Telecommunications platforms are typically provided by telecommunications/ telephone services companies that offer voice and data connectivity, wide area networking, wireless services, and Internet access. Leading telecommunica­tions service vendors include AT&T and Verizon. This market is exploding with new providers of cellular wireless, high-speed Internet, and Internet telephone services.

6. Internet Platforms

Internet platforms include hardware, software, and management services to support a firm’s website, including web hosting services, routers, and cabling or wireless equipment. A web hosting service maintains a large web server, or se­ries of servers, and provides fee-paying subscribers with space to maintain their websites.

The Internet revolution created a veritable explosion in server computers, with many firms collecting thousands of small servers to run their Internet operations. There has been a steady push to reduce the number of server com­puters by increasing the size and power of each and by using software tools that make it possible to run more applications on a single server. Use of stand­alone server computers is decreasing as organizations transition to cloud com­puting services. The Internet hardware server market has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of IBM, Dell, Oracle, and HP, as prices have fallen dramatically.

The major web software application development tools and suites are supplied by Microsoft (Microsoft Visual Studio and the Microsoft .NET develop­ment platform), Oracle-Sun, and a host of independent software developers, including Adobe.

7. Consulting and System Integration Services

Today, even a large firm does not have the staff, the skills, the budget, or the necessary experience to deploy and maintain its entire IT infrastructure. Implementing a new infrastructure requires significant changes in business processes and procedures, training and educa­tion, and software integration. Leading consulting firms providing this exper­tise include Accenture, IBM Services, HP, Infosys, and Wipro.

Software integration means ensuring the new infrastructure works with the firm’s older, so-called legacy systems and ensuring the new elements of the in­frastructure work with one another. Legacy systems are generally older trans­action processing systems created for mainframe computers that continue to be used to avoid the high cost of replacing or redesigning them. Replacing these systems is cost prohibitive and generally not necessary if these older systems can be integrated into a contemporary infrastructure.

Source: Laudon Kenneth C., Laudon Jane Price (2020), Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, Pearson; 16^th edition.