I was reading through ZDNet and saw an article about The WebOS and how it is already beginning to affect Business IT. In businesses all over the globe, we are seeing changes to the traditional data infrastructure. If we rewind a few years, the thought process in terms of IT is to create a way inhouse for a business to be productive. The price would be for the technology itself (software, hardware, etc.), the manpower, and often times the consultants to design the technological processes. This would cost a pretty penny however it would give the companies the technology they needed in order to operate and also give them  control of their technology.

Now we are seeing somewhat of a paradigm shift in technology. First we started to see technology and technology jobs become  outsourced. Technology providers would begin offering the technology as services. One example is when an organization will have their IT risk assessment managed by a third party provider rather than hiring the staff and purchasing the resources necessary for them to build it in house. We even see hosting companies like RackSpace (NYSE: RAX) take segments or the entire datacenter into their datacenter. This reduces the cost of internal infrastructure cost but what about technology itself? One thing that information technology has created is to allow companies to create a medium for their products.

Thanks to technology, companies will use technology as a medium to deliver their products or services. Example, how many of us have a bank account? Pretty much all of us do with some form of bank or credit union? How many of us check our bank account online? How many of us have the ability to check our bank information via our smart phone? Ever enroll in online bill pay? Banks have traditionally been in the business of handling your money (in a basic sense). As technology advanced, we began to see the ATM machine. Now we can perform our banking tasks 24/7. However you still have to drive to the ATM location. Now, thanks to technology, we have online banking. Now some larger banks have taken it to the next level and allow for smartphone access. Busineses use technology to advance their services and give them a competitive edge.

How much did it cost for them to develop that solution though? They probably had to hire a staff to develop and maintain the software. What about the infrastructure? Even if they outsource it to a third party, it still costs them a lot of money to develop. Now we have crowdsourcing. The best example of crowdsourcing that most people can identify is WikiPedia. WikiPedia is maintained by a small group however the inforamtion in WikiPedia is contributed by the public. Crowdsourcing is the idea of outsourcing research and development (or some other service) to an undefined and generally large community/crowd. One example of an enterprise level crowdsourced project is Innocentive. It was created for the purpose of allowing organizations to crowdsource projects involving mathematics, engineering, chemistry, etc. to “free lance” workers. Some major player in this program include Eli Lilly and Proctor & Gamble.

Now the next step we are seeing is with cloud computing and the WebOS. More and more business processes are moving to the world’s largest network, the Web. Businesses are beginning to move processes in the infrastructure to the web. It is actually a selling point to say that your software is available on the web. Salesforce is a customer relationship management system that is entirely web based. The software as a service (SaaS) model has become increasingly more popular with the growth of web technology from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

The popularity of virtualization and the cloud has become more popular, even now with Amazon’s adoption of the private cloud model. Now people can create their cloud for application server hosting while being safely behind a firewall and off of the public cloud.  Google announced Chrome OS not too long ago. Even Microsoft is talking about having Office 2010 being available for free online just like Google Docs. Microsoft is also going to be deploying their Azure cloud in full force with virtual servers, application hosting, and SaaS software.

Granted, there are some delays in this evolution. Some businesses are very leary about the idea of moving technology from their internal (or hosting) infrastructure to the public internet. Even the idea of the private cloud is still a big leap of faith to them. However, anyone reading the trades can tell that there is somewhat of a paradigm shift towards the idea of cloud computing and the WebOS than say 5 or 10 years ago.  More and more people all over the globe are gaining access to the internet. Internet is now becoming available on more and more devices than just the desktop or laptop. I can say in my life, about 97% of the time, I have internet access in some way, shape, or form. Whether it be through my Blackberry or at some hot spot.

As internet evolves and becomes more readily available, we’ll see the evolution of the cloud and Web OS which will bring us into “Web 3.0″ and we’ll see business utilizing the internet more in their infrastructure than we currently do. One thing we can expect to see with the evolution of Web OS like Google’s Chrome OS, Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and other technologies being developed, we’ll begin to see businesses downsizing their internal infrastructure and having hybrid technologies using the web and their datacenter.

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