More Vertical Integration

Post date: Oct 29, 2012 4:07:15 PM

The subject of my previous entry was the trend back to vertical integration. The entry talks about some more examples of this trend to vertical integration and some of the thing I think are driving this trend.

In the last few years we have seen more use of appliances as an approach to delivering software. Firewalls and network gear are one of the areas where trend in most prevenlant. Very few people still deploy firewalls or network gear such as routers on general purpose commodity hardware. Instead using purpose build hardware that has been codeveloped with the software to operated it.

Even infrastructure software such as DNS and DHCP are not being delivered on hardware systems. This helps avoid problems with the customer needing to integrate hardware, software and application software as well as configuring it for security. In many organizations this process can take a very long time as different groups may be responsible for each of these functions in a large organization. By using an application for these types of infrastructure applications many different organizations can be by-passed. One customers is currently going for an RADIUS appliance to avoid the need to implement RADIUS on a general purpose server. This will allow the organization that will "own" the application to own the entire system from top to bottom (hardware -> application) with the requirement to engage other groups who may have separate time lines.

Clearly, enterprises are going to benefit with quick implementation times but what are the benefits to this approach for the application suppliers? That is the subject of another entry!