Rachel Chalmers

Research Director, The 451 Group

State of the Infrastructure
16 minutes, 7.5mb, recorded 2011-06-16
Rachel Chalmers

The portability of code has led to a separation of the way services are offered, and a distinct division of Internet infrastructure. Here, Rachel Chalmers outlines the shakeout between development and operations into software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

It's an entertaining tale of hardware wiring of servers being revolutionized by various internet infrastructure heroes, with bloodless deaths of companies as ideas clash in high-stakes one-upmanship. In the end, who would have guessed "a bookstore" would take the lead with cloud offerings. 

Redundancies are weeded out, paradigms overthrown; there are population explosions of software on new platforms. Follow the rise and fall here to make your own predictions about the future of web infrastructure.


Rachel Chalmers is a research director at the 451 Group. Rachel has led the infrastructure software practice for The 451 Group since its debut in April 2000. She pioneered coverage on SOA, distributed application management, utility computing and open source software. Today she focuses on datacenter automation and server, desktop and application virtualization. She was also the lead author of many 451 Special Reports, including ’’V’ for Virtualization: Transforming the datacenter, driving M&A’ (Dec 2006) and ‘Virtualization II: Desktops and applications are next’ (Jun 2007).

Rachel began covering the technology sector in 1995, when she helped launch Computer Week, later PC Week Australia, for Australian Provincial Newspapers. She also worked as Deputy Editor of the award-winning Managing Information Systems (MIS) Magazine for the Strategic Publishing Group.

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