What are the current trends in computer hardware platforms?

The exploding power of computer hardware and networking technology has dramatically changed how businesses organize their computing power, putting more of this power on networks and mobile handheld devices and obtaining more of their computing capabilities in the form of services. We look at eight hardware trends: the mobile digital platform, consumerization of IT and BYOD, quantum computing, virtualization, cloud computing, edge computing, green computing, and high-performance/power-saving processors.

1. The Mobile Digital Platform

Chapter 1 pointed out that new mobile digital computing platforms have emerged as alternatives to PCs and larger computers. The iPhone and Android smartphones have taken on many functions of PCs, including transmitting data, surfing the web, transmitting e-mail and instant messages, displaying digital content, and exchanging data with internal corporate systems. The new mobile platform also includes small, lightweight netbooks optimized for wireless com­munication and Internet access, tablet computers such as the iPad, and digital e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle with some web access capabilities.

Smartphones and tablets are becoming the primary means of accessing the Internet and are increasingly used for business computing as well as for con­sumer applications. For example, senior executives at General Motors are using smartphone applications that drill down into vehicle sales information, finan­cial performance, manufacturing metrics, and project management status.

Wearable computing devices are a recent addition to the mobile digital platform. These include smartwatches, smart glasses, smart ID badges, and activity track­ers. Wearable computing technology has many business uses, and it is changing the way firms work, as described in the Interactive Session on Technology.

2. Consumerization of IT and BYOD

The popularity, ease of use, and rich array of useful applications for smartphones and tablet computers have created a groundswell of interest in allowing em­ployees to use their personal mobile devices in the workplace, a phenomenon

popularly called “bring your own device” (BYOD). BYOD is one aspect of the consumerization of IT, in which new information technology that first emerges in the consumer market spreads into business organizations. Consumerization of IT includes not only mobile personal devices but also business uses of soft­ware services that originated in the consumer marketplace as well, such as Google and Yahoo search, Gmail, Google Maps, Dropbox, and even Facebook and Twitter.

Consumerization of IT is forcing businesses to rethink the way they obtain and manage information technology equipment and services. Historically, at least in large firms, the IT department was responsible for selecting and managing the information technology and applications used by the firm and its employees. It furnished employees with desktops or laptops that were able to access corporate systems securely. The IT department maintained control over the firm’s hardware and software to ensure that the business was being protected and that information systems served the purposes of the firm and its management. Today, employees and business departments are playing a much larger role in technology selection, in many cases de­manding that employees be able to use their own personal computers, smartphones, and t ablets to access the corporate network. It is more dif­ficult for the firm to manage and control these consumer technologies and make sure they serve the needs of the business. The chapter-ending case study explores some of these management challenges created by BYOD and IT consumerization.

3. Quantum Computing

Quantum computing uses the principles of quantum physics to represent data and perform operations on these data. While conventional computers han­dle bits of data as either 0 or 1 but not both, quantum computing can process units of data as 0, 1, or both simultaneously. A quantum computer would gain enormous processing power through this ability to be in multiple states at once, allowing it to solve some scientific and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today. IBM has made quantum computing available to the general public through IBM Cloud. Google’s Alphabet, Microsoft, Intel, and NASA and are also working on quantum computing platforms. Quantum computing is still an emerging technology, but its real-world applications are growing.

4. Virtualization

Virtualization is the process of presenting a set of computing resources (such as computing power or data storage) so that they can all be accessed in ways that are not restricted by physical configuration or geographic location. Virtualization enables a single physical resource (such as a server or a storage device) to appear to the user as multiple logical resources. For example, a server or mainframe can be configured to run many instances of an operating system (or different operating systems) so that it acts like many different machines. Each virtual server “looks” like a real physical server to software programs, and multiple virtual servers can run in parallel on a single machine. VMware is the leading virtualization software vendor for Windows and Linux servers.

Server virtualization is a common method of reducing technology costs by providing the ability to host multiple systems on a single physical ma­chine. Most servers run at just 15 to 20 percent of capacity, and virtualization can boost server utilization rates to 70 percent or higher. Higher utilization rates translate into fewer computers required to process the same amount of work, reduced data center space to house machines, and lower energy usage. Virtualization also facilitates centralization and consolidation of hardware administration.

Virtualization also enables multiple physical resources (such as storage de­vices or servers) to appear as a single logical resource, as in software-defined storage (SDS), which separates the software for managing data storage from storage hardware. Using software, firms can pool and arrange multiple storage infrastructure resources and efficiently allocate them to meet specific appli­cation needs. SDS enables firms to replace expensive storage hardware with 1 ower-cost commodity hardware and cloud storage hardware. There is less under- or over-utilization of storage resources (Letschin, 2016).

5. Cloud Computing

It is now possible for companies and individuals to perform all of their com­puting work using a virtualized IT infrastructure in a remote location, as is the case with cloud computing. Cloud computing is a model of computing in which computer processing, storage, software, and other services are provided as a shared pool of virtualized resources over a network, primarily the Internet. These “clouds” of computing resources can be accessed on an as-needed basis from any connected device and location. Figure 5.9 illustrates the cloud com­puting concept.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as having the following essential characteristics (Mell and Grance, 2009):

  • On-demand self-service: Consumers can obtain computing capabilities such as server time or network storage as needed automatically on their own.
  • Ubiquitous network access: Cloud resources can be accessed using stan­dard network and Internet devices, including mobile platforms.
  • Location-independent resource pooling: Computing resources are pooled to serve multiple users, with different virtual resources dynamically assigned according to user demand. The user generally does not know where the com­puting resources are located.
  • Rapid elasticity: Computing resources can be rapidly provisioned, in­creased, or decreased to meet changing user demand.
  • Measured service: Charges for cloud resources are based on amount of resources actually used.

Cloud computing consists of three different types of services:

  • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Customers use processing, storage, networking, and other computing resources from cloud service providers to run their information systems. For example, Amazon uses the spare capac­ity of its IT infrastructure to provide a broadly based cloud environment selling IT infrastructure services. These include its Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing customers’ data and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for running their applications. Users pay only for the amount of comput­ing and storage capacity they actually use. (See the Interactive Session on Organizations). Figure 5.10 shows the range of services Amazon Web Services offers.
  • Software as a service (SaaS): Customers use software hosted by the ven­dor on the vendor’s cloud infrastructure and delivered as a service over a network. Leading software as a service (SaaS) examples are Google’s G Suite, which provides common business applications online, andcom, which leases customer relationship management and related software services over the Internet. Both charge users an annual subscription fee, although Google has a pared-down free version. Users access these applica­tions from a web browser, and the data and software are maintained on the providers’ remote servers.
  • Platform as a service (PaaS): Customers use infrastructure and program­ming tools supported by the cloud service provider to develop their own ap­plications. For example, Microsoft offers PaaS tools and services for software development and testing among its Azure cloud services. Another example is com’s Salesforce Platform.

Chapter 2 discussed Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, and related soft­ware services for desktop productivity and collaboration. These are among the most popular software services for consumers, although they are in­creasingly used in business. Salesforce.com is a leading software service for business. Salesforce.com provides customer relationship management (CRM) and other application software solutions as software services leased over the Internet. Its sales and service clouds offer applications for improv­ing sales and customer service. A marketing cloud enables companies to engage in digital marketing interactions with customers through email, mo­bile, social, web, and connected products. Salesforce.com also provides a community cloud platform for online collaboration and engagement and an analytics cloud platform to deploy sales, service, marketing, and custom analytics apps.

Salesforce.com is also a leading example of platform as a service (PaaS). Its Salesforce Platform gives users the ability to develop, launch, and manage ap­plications without having to deal with the infrastructure required for creating new software. The Salesforce Platform provides a set of development tools and IT services that enable users to build new applications and run them in the cloud on Salesforce.com’s data center infrastructure. Salesforce.com also lists software from other independent developers on its AppExchange, an online marketplace for third-party applications that run on the Salesforce Platform.

A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud is owned and maintained by a cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services, and made available to the general public or industry group. Public cloud services are often used for websites with public information and product descriptions, one-time large com­puting projects, developing and testing new applications, and consumer services such as online storage of data, music, and photos. Google Drive, Dropbox, and Apple iCloud are leading examples of these consumer public cloud services.

A private cloud is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may be hosted either internally or ex­ternally. Like public clouds, private clouds are able to allocate storage, comput­ing power, or other resources seamlessly to provide computing resources on an as-needed basis. Companies that want flexible IT resources and a cloud service model while retaining control over their own IT infrastructure are gravitating toward these private clouds.

Because organizations using public clouds do not own the infrastructure, they do not have to make large investments in their own hardware and soft­ware. Instead, they purchase their computing services from remote providers and pay only for the amount of computing power they actually use (utility computing) or are billed on a monthly or annual subscription basis. The term on-demand computing has also been used to describe such services.

Cloud computing has some drawbacks. Unless users make provisions for storing their data locally, the responsibility for data storage and control is in the hands of the provider. Some companies worry about the security risks re­lated to entrusting their critical data and systems to an outside vendor that also works with other companies. Companies expect their systems to be available 24/7 and do not want to suffer any loss of business capability if cloud infra­structures malfunction. Nevertheless, the trend is for companies to shift more of their computer processing and storage to some form of cloud infrastructure. Startups and small companies with limited IT resources and budgets will find public cloud services especially helpful.

Large firms are most likely to adopt a hybrid cloud computing model where they use their own infrastructure for their most essential core activities and adopt public cloud computing for less critical systems or for additional process­ing capacity during peak business periods. Table 5.2 compares the three cloud computing models. Cloud computing will gradually shift firms from having a fixed infrastructure capacity toward a more flexible infrastructure, some of it owned by the firm and some of it rented from giant computer centers owned by computer hardware vendors. You can find out more about cloud computing in the Learning Tracks for this chapter.

6. Edge Computing

Having all the laptops, smartphones, tablets, wireless sensor networks, and local on-premise servers used in cloud computing systems interacting with a single central public cloud data center to process all their data can be inefficient and costly. Edge computing is a method of optimizing cloud computing sys­tems by performing some data processing on a set of linked servers at the edge of the network, near the source of the data. This reduces the amount of data flowing back and forth between local computers and other devices and the cen­tral cloud data center.

Edge computing deployments are useful when sensors or other IoT devices do not need to be constantly connected to a central cloud. For example, an oil rig in the ocean might have thousands of sensors producing large amounts of data, perhaps to confirm that systems are working properly. The data do not necessarily need to be sent over a network as soon as they are produced, so the local edge computing system could compile the data and send daily reports to a central data center or cloud for long-term storage. By only sending important data over the network, the edge computing system reduces the amount of data traversing the network

Edge computing also reduces delays in the transmitting and processing of data because data does not have to travel over a network to a remote data center or cloud for processing. This is ideal for situations where delays of milliseconds can be untenable, such as in financial services or manufacturing.

7. Green Computing

By curbing hardware proliferation and power consumption, virtualization has become one of the principal technologies for promoting green computing. Green computing, or green IT, refers to practices and technologies for de­signing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associ­ated devices such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems to minimize impact on the environment.

According to Green House Data, the world’s data centers use as much en­ergy as the output of 30 nuclear power plants, which amounts to 1.5 percent of all energy use in the world. A corporate data center can easily consume over 100 times more power than a standard office building. All this additional power consumption has a negative impact on the environment and corporate operating costs. Data centers are now being designed with energy efficiency in mind, using state-of-the art air-cooling techniques, energy-efficient equip­ment, virtualization, and other energy-saving practices. Large companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple are starting to reduce their carbon foot­print with clean energy-powered data centers with power-conserving equip­ment and extensive use of wind and hydropower.

8. High-Performance and Power-Saving Processors

Another way to reduce power requirements and hardware sprawl is to use more efficient and power-saving processors. Contemporary microprocessors now feature multiple processor cores (which perform the reading and execu­tion of computer instructions) on a single chip. A multicore processor is an integrated circuit to which two or more processor cores have been attached for enhanced performance, reduced power consumption, and more efficient si­multaneous processing of multiple tasks. This technology enables two or more processing engines with reduced power requirements and heat dissipation to perform tasks faster than a resource-hungry chip with a single processing core. Today you’ll find PCs with dual-core, quad-core, six-core, and eight-core proces­sors and servers with 16- and 32-core processors.

Intel and other chip manufacturers are working on microprocessors that minimize power consumption, which is essential for prolonging battery life in small mobile digital devices. Highly power-efficient microprocessors, such as the A9, A10, and A11 processors used in Apple’s iPhone and iPad and Intel’s Atom processor, are used in lightweight smartphones and tablets, intelligent cars, and healthcare devices.

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

5 thoughts on “What are the current trends in computer hardware platforms?

  1. Elisha Kerger says:

    I think that is among the so much significant info for me. And i am satisfied reading your article. However want to commentary on some general issues, The web site style is wonderful, the articles is really great : D. Excellent task, cheers

  2. dashed says:

    Prеttу nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wished to sɑy that I have truly enjoyed
    browsing your blog posts. Іn any case I’ll be subscгibing to your rss feed and I hope you
    write again sօon!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *