MAKE IT SIMPLE
years (see Chart 3.2). Ronald 3.2 2.1 Towards ubiquity Schmelzer and Jason Web services, % of firms adopting Bloomberg at ZapThink, a 100 consultancy, think that web United 80 services are “nearing their tipStates EU ping point”, because they ben60 Asia efit from “the network effect: Pacific the adoption rate of the net40 work increases in proportion 20 to its utility”. In other words, FORECAST as with telephones or e-mail, 0 2002 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 a network with only a few Source: IDC people on it is not very useful; but as more people join it, it becomes exponentially more useful and thereby attracts even more members, and so on. Taking the idea of web services to its logical extreme, it is reasonable to ask why firms should continue to amass their own piles of Lego blocks, most of which will only duplicate the Lego blocks of business partners. Put differently, why have a datacentre if all you want is the data? This is a fairly new idea in the it industry, although in many established industries it has been around for a long time. People do not put safes into their basements but open bank accounts. Similarly, “most people shouldn’t build their own aeroplanes,” says Sun’s Mr Papadopoulos. “They shouldn’t even own them; in fact, they shouldn’t even rent them; what they should do is rent a seat on one.” In it, the equivalent of renting a seat on an aircraft is to rent software as a service from specialised firms called “application service providers”, or asps. These companies build huge datacentres so that other companies do not have to. The best-known asp today is Salesforce.com, a San Francisco firm that made its debut on the stockmarket in June 2004. As the name suggests, Salesforce.com specialises in software that salespeople use to keep track of their marketing leads and client information. Traditionally, firms buy this kind of software from vendors such as Siebel Systems, then try to integrate it into their own datacentres. With Salesforce.com, however, firms simply pay a monthly fee, from $65 per user, and go to Salesforce.com’s website, just as they go to Amazon’s when they want to shop for books, or eBay’s to buy secondhand goods. This arrangement makes a lot of things simpler. Users need to spend less time on training courses, because the interface – in essence, the web
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