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Information Technology in Transition

Organizational enterprise and new entrants are evaluating system and application software in relation to their business model, the needs of clients, and the economics associated with going directly to the next generation of software technology. Unlike the investment in proprietary software infrastructure which has been developed and implemented over a 50 year period as part of the modern era of data processing, these new technologies may not be categorically or immediately better than a web-enabling and retrofitting of an existing software infrastructure. Accordingly, the selection of the appropriate combination of proprietary and open source software and accompanying business decisions will require a comprehensive examination of the data to be processed in relation to anticipating advancements in a global economy. The consensus among industry leaders is that the immense number of individuals, a billion plus, who will be connecting to and joining the world wide web for the first time in the immediate future, will be a significant demographic component of any long-term strategy. In the aggregate, the parameters for evaluating and implementing coherent short and long term strategies are reasonably well defined. IBM mainframes are the repository for immense amounts of data and web browsers and possibly software as a service will be the connectivity and presentation software to networked computing workstations and a new generation of mobile devices.

Cloud computing is shifting the emphasis from locally managed server-client installations and information technology related services to externally located web-accessible computing centers consisting of thousands of servers. However, there is no single uniform precise definition of the cloud computing and there are different types of clouds. The hardware and software languages, development platforms, and scalable enterprise databases reflect competitive and evolutionary forces of proprietary software providers, open source software alternatives, and intellectual property laws in a global economy.

The appropriate mix and selection of hardware, software, and cloud computing technologies will be determined by a combination of budgetary constraints, competitive forces in the market, and regulations imposed by governing bodies. The degree of success will be highly dependent upon the ability of organizational enterprise to educate and train its employees to maintain, develop, and migrate its computer systems.

Migrating Legacy Programming Languages and
IBM Systems Software to Web Enablement Technologies

Web Server Technologies and Development Platforms

Courseware and Training Aids for Teaching Information Technology