I am interested lately in the future of business computing. Go back many years and business computing was all about mainframe computers and then came the desktop revolution and the fact that small business could easily meet their needs with a desktop computer. Medium sized businesses followed suit. Still for big processing jobs, nothing can be beat a mainframe.

Up until recently, mainframes were out of the reach of small and medium sized businesses, but I see that changing. It is becoming easier and easier to rent just part of a mainframe to run your business processes and I think this will become a trend. Computing is going to be more and more transfered off to outsourcing. Remember, if it isn’t your core business, then you should look at outsourcing it for cost reduction.

But still there are ways to take advantage of things if you decide to handle things yourself. I see this as a particular boon for an OS like Ubuntu Linux. Imagine if you could rent out dedicated quad core server in a data center and could use as a virtual cluster with a desktop in your office? Those kind of possibilities are possible.