Mar 24, 2006

This news is interesting to me for two reasons.  I love both games and animation , and I’ve also worked closely with IBM for the last few years.

IBM has been making a concentrated effort to push further into the SMB market (small & medium size businesses).  This has traditionally been antithetical to their “big business” mentality, but the SMB market is literally huge.  It also carries more low hanging fruit than the typical Fortune 500 company, that has everybody focused on them.

Turns out that IBM is also making this push into the animation and gaming industries, recently signing deals with Hoplon Infotainment, Online Game Services Inc. and RenderRocket.  The deals are around creating “innovative business models” that haven’t necessarily been considered before for companies of this size.  Read this as online gaming, on-demand delivery and increased reliability for existing gaming communities - basically (buzzword alert!) SOA and SAS.

SOA is a service-oriented architecture, meaning that it is specific content fed through a web service.  SOA abstracts the back end platform that the content or application comes from, and in turn, the provided service needs to know very little about the end user or consumer of the service.  This plug-and-play aspect makes it a real favorite for distributed applications.

SAS stands for Software as a Service, meaning something that sounds similar to SOA, but is very different.  SOA is a decoupled application architecture, whereas SAS means on-demand access to remotely hosted applications.  Think of it as starting up Microsoft Word, but not actually having the software installed on your machine.  Someone else makes sure it is up to date, keeps it security patched and is responsible for proper licensing - you just get to enjoy the benefits of use. 

SAS is a neat phenomenon that is really starting to take off - for 2 reasons: 1) it benefits software vendors, who want to create more reliable income streams from their software, and 2) the end user has no IT headaches regarding an SAS application.  Traditionally the realm of large corporations that need to roll out apps to hundreds or thousands of their employees, SAS is being moved into smaller companies because of the efficiency that it provides.  In fact, I expect that we will continue to see this trend move forward over the next few years and trickle down to the average consumer.

Apparently, what’s good for the goose is also good for the sparrow.

The only problem I see with that, is that we may soon have a monthly software bill, in addition to our cable bill, our internet bill, our phone bill, etc…  Progress costs, and make no mistake, the end user always ends up paying for it - whether it is directly billed like your phone or through higher prices of the end goods, it always comes out of our pockets.

Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Are you willing to give up your cell phone?
Kudos to IBM for thinking outside of their blue box.

animation, SAS, SOA, IBM, SMB