Posted by : bpburnwal on Nov 08, 2003 - 01:38 AM General

LOOKING at the enterprise computer market today, it is clear that two names - Intel and Microsoft - dominate with their technologies, setting what have become industry standards.
Major computer manufacturers such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Acer, to name a few, are selling their personal computers (PCs), workstations and servers based on Intel and Microsoft components.

So, is this an indication that the future of enterprise computing will be shaped around these two technologies? Is there hope yet for other "alternative platforms"?

Several weeks ago, I was at a Press conference hosted by Dell. Its director of worldwide product marketing Bruce E. Kornfeld attributed the company's success so far to the fact that its solutions are based on the Intel and Microsoft platforms.

Dell, he added, believes that this is the trend in the future because one no longer hears about common proprietary processors being improved, be it Sun's Sparc, Hewlett-Packard's Alpha, IBM's PowerPC or other reduced instruction set computer (RISC) or million instructions per second (MIPS) technologies.

I also had a chance to interview HP's computer-aided engineering portfolio manager Lee Fisher who contended that there is no future for other alternatives besides Intel and Microsoft.

The reason is simple; by adopting industry standard platforms, one can save a lot, he argued. The cost of maintaining proprietary machines has become absurd and most companies are looking at changing their technology platform into something that is more open and supported by many parties.

Adopting an open and industry standard technology is fine but it still comes with one problem. How do we tackle the security issue when everything is becoming more vulnerable to virus attacks and hacking because of one common platform?

Maybe one platform is not enough after all.