Gartner heralds second internet revolution

Enterprises must embrace internet technologies to address internal and external projects

Advances in broadband penetration, and the increasing trend of using the web to deliver applications, will help pave the way for a "second internet revolution", industry experts predicted today.

Analyst firm Gartner stated that a number of factors are acting as a catalyst for a second internet revolution.

These include concepts such as 'Web 2.0', a term applied to a perceived transition of the web from a collection of sites to a computing platform serving applications to end users; the emergence of internet 'platforms' from firms such as Google, eBay and Salesforce.com; and near ubiquitous internet access.

This process will ultimately see enterprises embedding internet and derivative components into their core business systems, according to the analyst.

Gartner defines this trend as "global-class computing" where the IT design focus is external to enterprises, and uses internet technologies and platforms to create an "architectural inversion".

The analyst firm draws a distinction between this emerging class of internet-based computing and existing enterprise-class models, which have an internal focus and use more traditional applications, tools and platforms.

"Global-class computing powers massively scalable operations such as eBay, Amazon and Google, and has completely different assumptions, approaches and principles, such as no control versus lockdown and no culture of consumer versus enterprise," explained David Mitchell Smith, Gartner vice president and fellow.

"This provides 'good enough' security, while emphasising speed and flexibility.

"Many enterprises have adopted internet technologies and global-class principles for internal deployments, and we have yet to hear of significant problems.

"This is in stark contrast to the often confounding attempts to scale enterprise technologies and approaches externally."

The bottom line for enterprises, according to the analyst, is that they should rapidly embrace internet technologies to address internal and external projects.