Google and Amazon are two of the companies offering Web-based services
that let your enterprise focus on its strongest value-added layer. Last
week I had an experience that drove home the giant leaps IT is making,
particularly with Web-based service models. In my spare time, I've
been developing a niche-content Web site. I'm user-testing it now, and
the biggest user request has been for a search box. Developing on a
shoestring, I'd written off search for version 1, thinking it would
take months to build. Imagine my delight to find that Google just began
offering a "business edition" of its custom search product, ad-free and
with results delivered via XML into your pages, for as little as $100
per year for up to a 5,000-page site. Within five hours of my own
tinkering time, I was up and running with site search. This is the future,
ladies and gentlemen. Tap into the expertise and resources of larger,
more specialized organizations and focus on the layer where you really
add value. Here's an even better example: A friend of mine, Avery Lyford,
has a company called Digisense, which provides secure data management
(backup, archiving, recovery, and search) services to SMB customers
through the managed service provider channel. Rather than building a
gigantic datacenter and writing man-centuries of code to deliver this
service, Digisense developed on top of best-of-breed resources and open
source modules so that the company could focus its own brainpower on
the key value-added security and management layers. The Digisense service,
offered as a subscription through your managed service provider, consists
of a small on-site appliance that encrypts and indexes the data locally
before sending it out over a regular broadband connection for archiving
to the Digisense back end. But where is the Digisense back end? It's at
Amazon. More Information
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