Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate many small businesses to allow them to innovate. Let me make a prediction: large-scale IT in small-to-medium businesses is going to rapidly decline. The era of IT shops having 5-10% (or more) of corporate budgets is over, and good riddance. Now, the following offer from Google comes with advertising, but what do small companies care? Why deploy big email/web servers with the corporate apps and why pay the Microsoft tax? You can run the full Google suite below on Linux on cheap hardware with broadband internet access, which you are most likely paying for anyway.
From the article:
It's pretty amazing to think about what a company can now get for $10 a year:
And, by incorporating some other free Google services, the company also gets:
- A complete, web-based IT infrastructure for its business
- A custom corporate portal/intranet for its employees
- Corporate e-mail service
- Corporate instant messaging
- Calendar software and services
- Web-site design software
- Web-site hosting
- Word-processing software
- Spreadsheet software
- Web-site analytics
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/your_new_it_bud.php
