20 years in IT history: Connectivity

2003: Virtualization

Imagine you have two (or more) IT objects, A and C. You want to hook A and C together so they can send signals to each other. Alas, they are incompatible, perhaps because they come from different manufacturers. Virtualization is the business of making a third object, B, that you slip between A and C to fool each of the original objects into thinking the other is speaking its own language, creating compatibility where before there was none.

The IT objects could be anything at all: servers, operating systems, routers, applications, hard disks, caches, whatever. Virtualization allows you to hook anything up to anything else and force the combo to work harmoniously.

Starting in 1999, a company named committed itself to the technology. The early years were slow. People complained that everything had to be done twice (first by A or C and then by B), which meant that everything took twice as many cycles and burned up twice as many resources. The process added complexity. But by 2003 the world was beginning to understand how versatile and powerful a solution this was. One of signs of this dawning comprehension came at the end of 2003 when EMC, a huge storage company, bought a big piece of VMware. In 2007, VMware went public and, in a generally listless market, had the biggest tech stock debut since Google. Virtualization had arrived.

2004: ERP Hangover