Saturday, November 6, 2010

[BLUG] Is the future of SMB software/hardware bleak?

Apple discontinued their XServe line this week, I suspect that OS X Server is next.

While it's easy to point fingers at how generally a bad job Apple did in this area, I have to wonder whether this whole area was just viewed as a dying area of the industry in Apple's eyes in general, not worth the resources? There is an argument to be made there, I think...

There has always been a gap between consumer technology and technology designed for large business in both hardware and software. SMB seems to be about creative improvising and flirting with offerings and solutions within both industries. However, things seem to be changing.

Why would a company run a server in-house anymore when they can outsource this and use a VPS hosted elsewhere, run a web-based app/service run somewhere else, outsource services such as email to Google or the like, etc. The emergence of smart phones is surely to even further perpetuate web services as a replacement for in-house operations as companies can contemplate using cheaper devices (i.e. smartphones, the iPad, etc.) as input devices. Even services such as file backup and sharing that were traditionally done in-house seem to be trending towards the cloud.

Virtualization has also been a big part of this as it makes less and less sense to run physical machines dedicated to stuff. I can't think of any fathomable task that any small business owner would want to do that couldn't be virtualized. There is also little reason to run these VMs in-house (especially in companies that can benefit greatly from disk I/O that bests SATA)

As an Apple, Dell, or whomever looks at this market and seeing it getting smaller and smaller every day, is it not just a matter of time before we stick a fork in the idea of small companies running their own servers doing mission critical stuff? The fact that you can buy Mac Mini and Pro servers now makes me think that Apple sees a need within SMB doing very light utilitarian sort of tasks like running file backups or hosting an internal company wiki or something, in which case there really isn't much need for special hardware or software. Is this perhaps prophetic?




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Joe Auty, NetMusician
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