Online software's steady march

Two stories caught my eye on the excellent Techmeme site this morning: EMC’s acquisition of Mozy, a developer of online storage, and Google’s decision to spruce up its GMail service.

Anybody possessing a passing acquaintance with software trends would have found it hard to miss the ongoing move from disk-based software to web-based programs that has been going on for over  a decade now. As that prolonged timeline suggests, changes in software usage tend to be evolutionary and spread out rather than revolutionary and overnight, but these two news items suggest the way that, for many areas of computing at least, the corporate server and even the local hard drive are becoming redundant.

EMC has plenty to lose if the business datacentre server starts to fade. The acquisition of Mozy, one of many startups that offers storage as a service, suggests EMC recognises that if anybody is taking its traditional business away, it might as well be EMC itself.

For many companies, online storage makes a lot of sense. You don’t hire storage admins, you don’t buy a ton of disks and tape, and you don’t have spikiness on the balance sheet.

As for online storage, GMail started out as a consumer-orientated service but edged into corporate activities because for many it represented a superior way to do business. I still prefer Yahoo Mail but GMail changed the face of freemail because it was the first to dish out large amounts of storage at no cost.

Now many of us use freemail services in preference to the business standard because we find it easier to access and that it frequently offers better security, performance, usability and resources than our employers are willing to provide.

For content management, the advantage of having files and mail available on the web is that we can use standard web services and tools to manipulate data. However, nearly all business users still have some dependency on local storage because of reasons such as latency or rules and regulations on the location of data.

Despite this, many startups are now effectively running their whole businesses on tools such as Google Apps and Salesforce.com. I strongly suspect that many other firms only haven’t moved because of inertia or the threat to status quo in terms of IT, procurement and other staffing.