The March of Technology

I am pleased to announce Jeff Tash as a guest blogger. Jeff has a very rich technology background, and over the next weeks and months, Jeff will help us unravel concepts such as cloud computing and virtualization, and explain what they mean in the world of ERP. Here’s Jeff…

The economy, like Mother Nature’s ocean tides, tends to ebb and flow.  But technological innovation, like Father Time, only moves ahead in one direction.  Technology’s inexorable march forward pursues a relentless drive toward ever more transistors on a chip, ever cheaper persistent storage, and ever broader communications ubiquity. 

 Since the invention of the integrated circuit, the number of transistors that can be placed on a single chip has doubled approximately every two years.  This long-term trend, known as Moore’s Law (named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore who first observed and forecast this predictive exponential growth curve; and named by VLSI pioneer and Caltech professor Carver Mead), has been linked to virtually every electronic miracle of the past half century — speed, size, cost, memory capacity, etc. — and the innumerable revolutionary products that the technology has spawned — personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, iPods, to name but a few.  Today, more transistors are being produced across the globe annually than grains of rice — and at a lower cost. 

 As the number of transistors on an integrated circuit continues to increase, the size of the transistor shrinks, the cost per transistor plummets, and the speed at which the transistor operates rises.  Nowadays, there are so many transistors on an individual chip that microelectronic manufacturers are creating multi-core microprocessors that combine multiple CPUs onto a single sliver of silicon.  A dual-core processor contains two CPUs; a quad-core processor four, and so on. 

Even more remarkable than the growth in performance and concomitant decline in the price of computer chips has been the explosion in storage capacity.  Over the past 15 years the cost-effectiveness of hard drives has grown 125 times faster than Moore’s Law.  Furthermore, looking ahead into the not-too-distant future, digital storage technology continues to have the potential to pack data far more densely — thereby enabling ever greater increases in capacity and ever deeper cuts in cost.  This past April 2009, for example, General Electric achieved a breakthrough in optical holographic storage by creating a standard-size disc that can hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.  The holograms (like those printed on plastic VISA or MasterCard credit cards) act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser shines on them, and so each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.  GE’s holographic discs can hold 500 gigabytes of data.  By comparison, Blu-ray is available in either 25- or 50-gigabyte discs, while a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.  When Blu-ray was introduced in late 2006, a 25 GB disc cost about $1 per gigabyte.  The GE 500 GB holographic discs are expected to cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. 

 As amazing as improvements in electronics and storage technology have been, the truly most profound impact on society occurred only by combining processing and storage breakthroughs with the revolutionary emergence of digital communications and the advent of cell phones and the Internet.  By the end of 2008, the number of mobile cellular telephones worldwide was approximately 4.1 billion.  In addition, the Internet and its companion World Wide Web have fundamentally transformed how information is currently accessed and exchanged by people and businesses. 

 In the coming months, contributing to this blog, I will be commenting on how I envision technology impacting the world of enterprise applications software.  We’re going to delve into cloud computing, virtualization, SaaS (Software as a Service), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and sundry other topics.  Today’s economy may have led the world into a global recession, or perhaps even a depression, but advances in technological innovation and invention have steadfastly continued to propel us forward and undoubtedly will help us recover from the existing economic crisis.  There will be paradigm shifts aplenty in the foreseeable future just as there have been countless others in the recent past.  I look forward to exploring some of these with you.

 Until next time…

Jeff Tash (aka ITscout)

5/7/2009