Confused about Servers

Last week I got into some debates about the death or evolution of the PBX. Some people insist the PBX is dead, but I believe it just continues to evolve. Admit it or not, Microsoft Lync has 100 years of telephony evolution under its hood.

The bigger point though is how complex things are becoming to define in communications. It is a far bigger issue than “PBX.” What is Unified Communications? What is Cloud? What is open? What’s the point of all this communications technology if we can’t agree on language and terminology?

Add to the list the term “Server.” I am not sure what a server is any more. Are you?

IDC recently reported server market share for 2012. Leading the pack was IBM with a market share of 30.7 percent and server revenue over $15 billion. The next three vendors were HP, Dell, and Oracle with 2012 revenue totalling $51.2 billion. It’s a big market, but it was actually down 1.9 percent from 2011. These numbers all seem pretty clear.

Except for that servers really are not servers any more thanks to hypervisors. Now multiple “servers” run on a server. VMware alone did $4.61 billion in 2012 and claims 480,000 customers. VMware recently projected its annual revenue growth could be as high as 20 percent by 2016. That’s a lot of virtual servers running on a lot of physical servers. The boundaries between virtualized servers and private clouds is also a bit nebulous.

Then comes the public cloud.

Gartner predicts that public cloud services (which reduces the need for enterprise servers) will hit $131 billion by 2017. That’s a big number, but it can’t be directly compared against servers because 1) it represents a service, not a server; and 2) it is a U.S. market figure instead of worldwide (which means it’s a lot bigger worldwide). That brings me to what are these public clouds running on anyway? Google and Amazon build their own servers (as does Facebook), and those servers aren’t included in IDC’s worldwide server numbers.

We know public cloud is growing, and we know hypervisors continue to get better. That potentially explains why worldwide server totals declined in 2012. Virtual servers are likely growing pretty quickly, but since the worldwide server reports don’t count worldwide servers, we may never know.

Not to mention all the servers running PBXs.

I am sure that the future UC deployment will involve all of these server types – physical, virtual, and public service (including SaaS, IaaS, and Paas). So being server savvy is a good idea. Hybrid deployments will become extremely common, if no reason other than all that these different server types exist.

2 Responses to "Confused about Servers" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 4/10/2013 8:35:19 AM

Dave,

We are moving towards a network of "servers" that support a variety of software applications that inter-operate and share data that are also in the network. Whether those software applications are "private" or "public" or a hybrid combination, should make no difference as to where the "servers" are located. That's the big change that is evolving for both business process applications, and person-to-person communication applications.

With consumer BYOD, the endpoint devices must all be connected through a common network , and the PSTN (or POTS) is being replaced by IP communications for all modes of contact. So, we should be looking at a "smart" Public IP Network as the interaction service network of the future (PIPN?) for both wired and wireless connections for all an end user's needs.

I guess we are just calling it the "cloud!"

Art Rosenberg 4/11/2013 9:55:18 AM

I think we can also add the confusion that is being caused by the term "channel." Is it a communication connection, a user interface mode, or a marketing and support relationship?