11.1. Introduction

There are many important and interesting advances taking place that will have an impact on the future of enterprise software delivery. Industry analyst reports, software journals, and company web pages all list many critical factors for the future. Several noteworthy recent events have especially provoked consideration of the deeper implications on global enterprise software delivery.

The first observation concerns the availability of computing resources. It’s been suggested that perhaps 20 percent of all the servers bought in recent years are being acquired by a small group of companies (such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Yahoo).¹ This massive consolidation of computing power is being housed in vast warehouses where tens of thousands of servers deliver computing resources to consumers around the world. The investment in infrastructure is driving down the cost of obtaining computing power and storage. Nicholas Carr refers to this as “the big switch” from locally owned computer resources to IT as a commodity utility provided by a handful of public infrastructure providers, where users can choose the services they want driven by low-cost suppliers [16].