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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 “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 “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, Suárez 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 “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
“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 “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 halt. 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 system 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 1.35 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.
Virtualization will be the maximum impact method modifying infrastructure and operations by
2012. In reference to Gartner, Inc. 2008, 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.com (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.com/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.
3. 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 demanding 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 minutes.
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 maintenance.
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. So SME organizations like InfoTech Solutions should seriously look in to their E-business
strategy for considering the virtualization or they may be left behind the competitors.
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