Two computers per employee

There is an initiative to provide children in developing world with a laptop each. Which is very laudable. What will you think if I were to tell you that enterprises too have similar initiative. They are spending money, even in these turbulent times, to put an extra desktop computer on each employee's desk?

Well that's what you do when you put a specialised VoIP phone on each desktop. A VoIP phone is nothing but a computer which runs only one application, viz. a telephone. Of course there are applications, which can run on your existing desktop PC and provide same functionality - popularly known as Soft Phones.

In fact providing soft phones to every employee, especially those on move, will make more sense. Then they can use those soft phones to connect to the world while on move, while spending only on ISP connection.

So why does not this happen? Why we keep seeing those ubiquitous VoIP phones on each desk? 

I would attribute this to ineffective enterprise architecture governance. If you know how decision to introduce VoIP is made, you would understand my point. VoIP is typically introduced as upgrade to existing telephony infrastructure. Fact is,  it is NOT an upgrade to existing infrastructure. If you were to replace twisted copper cable network with optical network, that would have been an upgrade to existing infrastructure.  Introducing VoIP phones is same as introducing a new application in your enterprise, and hence should be subjected to same level of governance rigour to make sure it is consistent with your enterprise architecture and you understand full implications of your decision. 

When you decide to use a specialised VoIP phone over soft phone, you are implicitly stating an architecture principle, 'Appliance over application'. If you chose this principle, then adding extra capability (say ability to send faxes) may require a new appliance. Whereas if you chose 'application over appliance', it might be a simple feature update to existing application. See, what I mean?

I would rather have this principle established out of an enterprise IT oracle function rather than through sales pitch of a vendor.

Cloud or SaaS?

In response to my earlier post Apoorv  has pointed that there are questions on viability of SaaS model. My take is that SaaS is a commercial model whereas Cloud computing is an architectural approach. One can deploy cloud computing in an enterprise need not be as SaaS. In the same vein one can deploy SaaS with traditional tools, over proprietary infrastructure without cloud computing.

I feel Chrome has hastened the cloud up-take in enterprise. SOA has been found useful for integration of apps and sharing of services. SOA also promotes a vision of composite apps, where ultimate control of composing apps is put in end user's hand. SOA has not realised that vision yet. In my opinion cloud computing is a required enabler for this composite apps vision propagated by SOA. Without Cloud computing combined with SOA,  realising the composite application vision is very difficult - if not impossible. 

I also believe cloud may have positive impact on SaaS as a model. SaaS as commercial model may have viability issues. Again, I dont have enough data points, but my gut feel is a pure commodity applications can be successfully deployed in SaaS model. Trick is to make many users to accept it as commodity without any customisation. Does such pieces of commodity applications exists within enterprise application space? I believe so. But carving them out and putting them in SaaS mode is a challenge more in terms of organisational  inertia than a technology challenge. Without sufficient scale SaaS model is indeed doomed. The question is who buckles first, orgnisational intertia to change or the surviving capacity of SaaS providers.

So does cloud computing has future? Definitely. Does SaaS model have a future? May be, if SaaS providers can build the required scale by somehow overcoming orgnisational inertia.