Once in a while, I sit back and think about what are the real transformational forces that will change how information technology (IT) operates. And recently I've come to a conclusion that there are three fundamental technological movements that will bring about the revolution.

1. Software virtualisation
Abstracting software from the underlying CPU yields mobility, consolidation, and degrees of scalability. It also simplifies automated management and portability of workloads through virtual appliances or Amazon Virtual Machines (AMIs). Except for a few managerial kinks, this technology is already a de-facto system in IT transformation.

2. Infrastructure orchestration
As I recently outlined, this technology is a perfect complement to software virtualisation; it essentially gives mobility to infrastructure. It allows IT operations to define I/O, storage connectivity and networking entirely in software, resulting in re-configurable CPUs. Egenera was a pioneer in this area, but the market now has a wider choice with the announcement of Cisco's Unified Computing solution.

Unified computing or  infrastructure orchestration is valuable because it enables a highly reliable, scalable and re-configurable infrastructure. It permits IT to ‘wire-once’ and then create CPU configurations (virtual Network Interface Cards, Host Bus Adapters, storage connections etc) using a unified or consolidated networking practise. Plus, it is a simple and efficient approach. Think of this as a provisioning hardware using software. We'll see this technology catching up in the market.

3. Intelligent software provisioning
While I'm not sure what this market segment may eventually be called, it represents the third critical datacentre management component. It gives software mobility and  yields infrastructure flexibility.

FastScale is one company that is largely into intelligent software provisioning. Picture an intelligent software provisioning system that knows the minimum amount of software libraries needed to run an OS or application. As it turns out, the provisioning is usually something around 10 -15 percent of the multi-gig bag-of-bits you try to boot every time you bring up a server. And that even includes virtual machines (VMs).

The result? Three really nice properties:
a) Speed: Getting applications up and running faster. Not having to move as many bits over the network to boot a given server    is a real time and money saver.

b) More efficient consolidation: With smaller software footprints, more VMs, appliances can fit on a given memory footprint. This means denser consolidation is frequently possible  and not to mention dollar savings on those gigs of memory you have to buy when you consolidate.

c) Inherent configuration management: With a database of all libraries and bits, you can always monitor configurations and verify compliance. Moreover, you can track what patches went where.

d) Ability to provision into any form of container: In other words, this system can provision onto a bare-metal CPU or for that matter into an appliance like an Amazon Virtual Machine AMI if you're using a computing cloud.

This intelligent provisioning approach is also highly-complementary to existing compliance and configuration management products such as OpsWare (HP) or BladeLogic (BMC).

Summary
So what if you have all three of these technologies? You'd have a datacentre where workloads were portable and platform-independent; infrastructure was instantly re-configurable and adapted to business conditions; software could be distributed and brought-up on the order of seconds, thereby allowing adaptation to scale and business demand. Pretty sweet, eh?

Ken Ostrich is Technnical VP oF Product Marketting at Egenera,US.