Social Glass

We’re starting to see a shift in the industry where software vendors package their products inside servers and deliver them as a single cohesive unit. The “appliance model” has a lot of benefits and makes sense for IT Managers who wish to deploy software that maximizes value but minimizes the infrastructural impact and the time required to implement.

The Benefits

• “Plug and Play”: Appliances are designed to swiftly integrate into the network and be up and running within minutes or hours. I’ve personally installed the Google Search Appliance several times and have had it up and running in 20 minutes with some content being indexed and served about an hour after that.
• Service Level Agreement: Generally license models bind the entire appliance to a single SLA. This means if something, anything (hardware or software), breaks, the vendor is liable. This removes a lot of risk from customers as traditionally liability was dealt with as follows:
• customer: “The software’s broken”
• vendor: “No, it’s your server that’s broken. You didn’t configure and scale it correctly”.
• customer: “No, I followed your installation instructions and it doesn’t work”.
• You get the idea

Trends in the Market

Google was the first company I’ve had experience with that’s offered appliance-based products. I’ve since noticed several Enterprise 2.0 solution providers with appliance offerings. These include:

• Suite Two
• SocialText
  

This is a fantastic idea and will dramatically diminish the complexity in deploying an Enterprise 2.0 solution. Companies won’t have to worry about sizing their infrastructure to meet internal demand and the total cost of ownership of maintaining these systems is reduced considerably. I’d bet money that the appliance model will be the status quo in a few years.