By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Since yesterday's Network Performance Daily post which criticized Nicholas Carr for a quote in Network World, I've finished reading The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Keep in mind, I agree with the main thrust of Carr's arguments in The Big Switch and recommend it. The main thrust being that the software applications that were once developed in-house in a client-server model are increasingly moving towards "the cloud" of SAAS and Web applications.

The Network World article take on the book made it seem like Carr's core message was that IT departments, as we know them, would be obsolete. Admittedly, he does try to make that point in the book. I, however, don't think that that is the focus of the book.

There was one example from The Big Switch that stuck with me - partially because I'm a gaming geek as well as a techie. On page 114, Carr mentions "Second Life", a computer game which is mostly delivered as a service.

"Second Life is an example of a utility service supplied over the Internet and shared simultaneously by many people. It's very different from traditional computer games, which need to be installed separately on each player's hard drive. But Second Life is also itself a construction of many other utility services. The "computer" that runs Second Life doesn't exist in any one place; it's assembled, on the fly, from various data-storage and data processing molecules floating around in the global computing cloud… The program constantly "talks," over the Internet, with the main software Linden Lap uses to generate its online world. That software runs on hundreds of server computers that are housed in two data centers, one in San Francisco and one in Dallas, owned not by Linden Lab but by utility hosting companies. Every server computer contains, in turn, four virtual computers, each of which controls a 16-acre plot of land in Second Life. All the real and virtual computers work in tandem to create the vast world that residents experience as they play the game."

Second Life is an excellent example of "Gaming As A Service." There's just one problem with Second Life (other than the fact that most people don't even have enough time for their first life), and that's network performance.

The key draw of Second Life is that the world is entirely created by end-users. All attractions, games, and objects are the result of savvy Second Life end-users who have created these things to share or sell with other end-users. Unlike other MMORPGs, the world of Second Life is infinitely customizable, so it would be a bad idea to try to run it as a client-server application. Since all the information changes every time you play, (and sometimes while you play,) running Second Life as a service makes sense.

But there are significant drawbacks to this model. Loading up the information needed to get the details about the world, even on the fastest of Internet connections, takes forever. It's a bandwidth hog. Even if network performance conditions are ideal, rendering textures and shapes over the Internet is a time-consuming endeavor, and there is a very clear tradeoff between the quality of the visual application, and the quality of game's application performance. Controls aren't very responsive at all, mostly because the information about avatar movement is competing with graphics and world information on the pipe. This gives everything a frustrating, "bouncy" quality. Comparing that to a traditional client/server model type game - say, "World of Warcraft" - and the difference is apparent. WoW is quick and responsive, can handle multiple, and very complex, users very well, and while there may be lag on WoW at times, it never approaches the same amount of lag in Second Life. Even "Guild Wars," which has a 101KB client but is similar in scope, complexity, and gameplay as WoW, downloads the game software to the client at run time and caches it for the future rather than try to run the entire game off the server - and you can tell from the performance difference that, for right now, most gaming will continue to follow the client/server model.

Indeed, application and network performance is so important to gamers that even in an age where you can find a game of "Team Fortress 2," "Battlefield 2142" or "Quake Wars" any time, any place, 24 hours a day over the Internet, gamers lug their desktop systems around with them, get together with anywhere from 4 to 300 friends, connect it all to a single, created network, and play in what are known as "LAN parties." Why? Because there's less network latency, and better performance under a network that you control than there ever will be over even the best case online scenarios.

So will IT departments become obsolete? No - forgetting for a moment that somebody has to manage the infrastructure on the business side to allow all those end-users to connect to the cloud to access SAAS apps and "virtual data centers" and the like, the popularity of both World of Warcraft and Second Life show that both SAAS apps and client-server apps will be around, each model used for the advantages they provide in the cases where those advantages are beneficial.

It's breathtaking what is going on in the industry in this area and Carr puts his finger right on it in The Big Switch. There are revolutionary things going on in the SAAS field. Google Gears is bringing online apps offline. Virtualization is turning hardware into software, and when you turn hardware into software, you can offer "hardware-as-a-service."

But as for IT, well, maybe some companies will be able to make do - or be willing to risk - exclusively using SAAS solutions. But for most large companies, they need performance and control, not necessarily utility-like convenience, from their applications. IT departments aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

What do you think will be the future of IT in the SAAS environment? Feel free to discuss it in our comments section.