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Executive Summary

A new era of computing is upon us. It is the era that will bring an end to in-house computing. Our response is “No MoreServers.” This is not just about cloud computing. Nor is this just about Software-as-a-Service. In this era, there will be nosunk costs on servers or licenses because you pay only for what you use. The elimination of the capital expense in the ITbudget is perhaps the greatest benefit to businesses since the advent of computing itself. Importantly, the cycle of shiftingbetween outsourced providers and in-house IT will end because there will be no systems to depreciate, decommission, orcling to in order to yield a hoped for ROI on a prior approach. Businesses will instead just shift from one service providerto another. This is a service-centric computing era and the economics of this era’s computing services are causingmassive change. New businesses selling new applications are emerging rapidly, which would have been cost prohibitivewhen an infrastructure build-out was necessary. These applications are empowering employees to achieveunprecedented productivity at minimal costs. Small businesses are abandoning servers at a rapid pace, and are forcinglarger competitors to become radically more efficient. A “No More Servers” strategy will deliver the radical gains neededfor success. Embracing this strategy requires a computing partner a business can trust. As your business exploresRackspace

, Amazon, Google, Salesforce and other leaders of this new era, be sure to consider carefully the quality andhistory of each vendor’s customer service. Don’t miss the revolution. Embrace a “No More Servers” strategy today.

The Future

Imagine an office where the only device at each desk is a monitor. No hard drives,routers, or servers. Just a fast pipe to the Internet. From this monitor, imagine that eachemployee has secure access to any application and unlimited storage. On the other end of the fast pipe, imagine that the applications developed by your firm, and those used byyour employees, run their workloads on limitless computing power. And now imaginethat you achieved this scenario with no up-front costs and thrift-store prices for exactly,and only, what you consume.Finally, imagine your annual party. Executives are toasting to higher profits fromincreased productivity. Your workforce is celebrating the productivity gains because ithappened from the removal of bottlenecks. With many obstacles gone, the product teamsare praised and pleased to be releasing more applications, and in record time. And yourCFO is smiling about the money saved from terminating your data center lease andceasing to buy new systems without sacrificing revenue.No data centers…No in-house computing…

NO MORE SERVERS!

This dream scenario is already here, at thousands of small and mid-sized companies.And it is spreading, as more and more computing (even at large enterprises), moves outof in-house servers and onto the web – onto a widely distributed system of hardware andsoftware known as the cloud. This is the unavoidable end game. Every business has thechance to win by acting on this opportunity.

The Past

Since the advent of the mainframe, innovations continue to extend the availability of computing capacity to more businesses. Each innovation also increases the amount of computing resource available to each business. Critically, each new computinginnovation also presents a lower cost approach per unit of computing resource. Whileachieving more computing power, by more businesses, all at a lower cost is an obviouswin for the corporate world, adoption of the “new” approach is often slow. Thereason….sunk costs! Businesses want to realize a return on their past computinginvestments before adopting the new approach. The larger the firm, the larger the sunk cost. This is why the beneficiaries at each new computing innovation are typicallysmaller firms because they have little or no sunk cost.Outsourcing has been a means of lessening the perceived loss of ROI (Return OnInvestment). Time-sharing was essentially the embrace of outsourcing when themainframe was introduced. As the cost of mainframes dropped, corporations beganamassing large in-house IT teams around their mainframe infrastructure. When client-server computing was introduced, firms began outsourcing their mainframe operations sothey could be wound-down where possible so as to ramp up their use of client-serverapplications. When Web-based architectures emerged, outsourcing was embraced again

followed by enterprises ramping up internal IT as the cost of servers continued to fall.Essentially, the cyclical nature of outsourcing versus in-house IT has been around fordecades. The cycle changes direction at each new computing innovation. The embrace of outsourcing is happening again thanks to cloud computing innovations.Dare we say, this time…the cycle will end. Enterprises should not purchase any morehardware and begin their path to consuming computing resources as a service. Simplystated, No More Servers!

The Present

To clear up any potential confusion, of course the future of computing will involve servers. In fact, we expect thenumber of servers will grow meaningfully from what Gartnerestimates as 44 million servers in-use worldwide. However,instead of the business purchasing, maintaining, andupgrading servers, they will simply consume the computingresource from service providers. If you are thinking this is thesame value proposition that outsourcers have presented formore than a decade, we bring you to the key point of whythis time is different. The cost of adoption for the current eraof computing has no upfront cost. There is no down-stroke.There will be no sunk costs. This era of computing is a pay asyou go, use only what you need, which can truly free anorganization to finally embark on new projects at a neverbefore possible pace.We are not just telling the same tale about how “cloud computing” is the holy grail. It isactually crazy why so many people get caught up in needing a definition of what cloudcomputing is or is not. This paper offers up no definition because the definition is not thepoint. Dedicated computing resources from a service provider deliver the same benefitsdiscussed in the preceding paragraph. The point is that the concern over sunk costs, aswell as wasted human and financial resources spent managing IT internally, is now theburden of the service provider, which is taking the inventory burden from the enterprise.Forever!Since the inventory and management burden will forever beon the shoulders of the service provider, it is in our bestinterest to educate and encourage knowledgeable adoption of cloud computing. Why? Because it is the most efficient wayto manage inventory from a single resource pool than frommany isolated pools. This is the same reasoning whybusinesses will never realize the benefits of an internalprivate cloud. However, not all “cloud computing” servicesare capable today of supporting the thousands of applicationsin production at businesses worldwide. For example, supportfor Microsoft Windows is absent in most cloud provider’sarsenal, but that too will happen. So, again, the point is not

This era of computing is apay as you go, use onlywhat you need, which cantruly free an organization tofinally embark on newprojects at a never beforepossible pace.…the point is not just aboutadopting cloud computing.Instead, the point is thatbuying and deployingservers in-house is nolonger advantageous.

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NoMoreServers.com

Cloud computing and SaaS are examples of the new computing era. This white paper, from Rackspace, discusses the point that this new computing era leads to the end of in-house se... (More)

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