Personal Computers were the future, or at least they were for my generation. The evolution of these machines moved at what was thought to be a frenetic pace. Intel released the Pentium Chip in 1993 which was a game changer at 66Mhz, although it’s insignificant to the 3.2Ghz that is now running in my current machine.
These jumps in speed correlated with the advent of colour GUI’s and most importantly the internet. All of a sudden, machines could be programmed to talk to each other. However, there was still the challenge of speed. The average dial-up modem downloaded at an incredibly slow pace, such that it was still impossible to send files from business-to-business, with it being cheaper and faster to send a disk by courier, even if your company was so forward-thinking and wealthy enough to afford a direct leased line.
Due to these restrictions, virtually all businesses set up their own systems within their buildings. These ranged from the mysterious box in the corner of the room that nobody was allowed to ever turn off, to fully fledged network servers in special rooms. These rooms were guarded by the exclusive IT Manager. Access was limited and God forbid someone wanted to gain access!
Moving away from inflexible legacy systems, businesses are now able to innovate faster without the need for large upfront capital expenditure.
— Barry Last | Chief Technical Officer
Some servers were put online in specialist data centres but most of these were to run your website or internet chat rooms and news groups. As a business for the most part, you had to purchase your server from a hosting company with the majority of the purchase being made up front. Or if you could, you managed to negotiate monthly or quarterly terms.
Most software for these machines was still sold, and you could be issued with a CD-Rom that you had to get to your server and install manually, with each update requiring a new CD. This later evolved into being able to download the updates.
Websites were still the main stay of the internet, and it was flourishing until the Dot-Com bubble burst in 2002. After the bubble burst there was a flurry of innovation and a paradigm shift away from what were traditional systems. Companies started selling their services as software solutions or software as a service ( SaaS ), but also their extra server infrastructure. Amazon was the leader and innovator on this. One of their engineers saw the opportunity that as the company had brought enough capacity to deal with their busiest periods, the rest of the time it was sitting there idle.
The same was with their server technology that was advanced to scale and load for these peak times too. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born and is now one of Amazon’s biggest subsidiaries providing on-demand cloud computing platforms for businesses across the globe. Moving away from inflexible legacy systems, businesses are now able to innovate faster without the need for large upfront capital expenditure. As innovation speeds up with cloud-based systems, data can be captured at speed and is utilised to not only make better informed decisions, but also to validate those changes and have a positive effect.
At ELLA we work with best of breed cloud technologies and data processes. We can help your business implement the solutions you need, giving you the technology to empower your people and transform the way you serve your customers.
Find out more about our solutions or contact ELLA.
