Chapter 1. Introduction

We've traveled the world during the past few years, assessing infrastructures for Information Technology (IT) organizations for Fortune 1000 companies and new upstarts that have become the major portals to the Internet with market caps worth billions. We found that all of the organizations studied were facing the pressures of global competition and were trying to accomplish more with fewer resources. We met with executives, managers, and technical staff in a variety of industries on five continents. They knew that their computing environments would not stand the test of time. They were searching for information technology solutions to help them achieve competitive advantage. We were hired to help them get ready for the next business millennium.

Most of the organizations implemented their infrastructures over ten years ago, in some cases they actually started 30 years ago. We found large installed bases of legacy and client/server application software. In many cases, these organizations had architectures that resembled a collage of software languages, data storage (e.g., flat files, RDBMS, etc.), hardware, networks, and you name it. In some cases it was downright scary what we found.