Enterprises are ushering into a new era of computing; an era where a sourcing-delivery hybrid is altering the concept of assets as we have known them. Everything is now being offered as a service (EaaS).

The obvious reasons are the recent widespread recession and technology advances. Are there other not-so-obvious reasons that are equally compelling? Is the future where we are going to see more infrastructure, application development, applications, data, business intelligence, and IT management delivered as services a desirable end-state? Should we collectively encourage this? Or is it given that the tech decision making community must adopt/ adapt itself to?

The answers are still evolving. But given the pace at which change descends upon us, we must prepare ourselves with an understanding of what the ‘EaaS’world will be. For example: How will these be offered?

Either from on-premises nextgeneration data centres, services abstracted from legacy systems,via outsourced IT operations or from a growing ecology of third-party cloud providers.

Like most other things that constantly aim to improve, cloud computing is also aiming to be more than just a small chunk of the business operations. Some of the renowned Internet companies are not just content in being a small part of the operations. With their hardware capabilities, they could become the provider of the entire business processes. Internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com have begun offering EaaS or Everything as a Service to business users.

EaaS offers a lot of benefts including decreasing dependency on the hardware. Even without any application stored in the desktop, online services could be extracted. Most of the cloud computing services could be accessed online through major browsers. There is no specifc location required to deliver services. EaaS also improves tenancy.  

But the question whether asset and hardware vendors will lose out if they don’t participate in the EaaS market is yet to be answered. We will probably run a poll soon to get the popular mandate on this.

In this issue, we offer a comprehensive perspective on EaaS to help you evaluate what is good and what is not.

rahul.mani@9dot9.in