It's becoming clear that there are two macro trends happening across hardware and software that are essentially mirror images of each other. And taken together, these two trends cumulatively will result in a reinvention of everything we associate today with the term enterprise computing.

The first trend on the hardware side is the movement toward turning every hardware system into a virtual resource. This process initially got started as part of an effort to consolidate servers that saw IT organizations becoming increasingly interested in virtual machine software from companies such as VMware, which is now a unit of EMC. But as this trend develops, IT organizations are discovering the benefits of virtual storage solutions that leverage approaches such as thin provisioning to boost utilization arrays of storage arrays.

Taken together, both of these virtualization technologies let IT organizations manage their hardware resources at a higher level of abstraction, resulting in less need to purchase hardware and the hiring of fewer people to run them.

In aggregate, this hardware trend is creating significant savings that IT organizations are now using to fund the next major trend in software that is being driven by the advent of SOA (service-oriented architectures), which is one of those classic overnight revolutions that has been 10 years in the making.

What is finally pushing SOA into the mainstream is a fundamental shift in terms of how IT people think about applications. Instead of seeing applications as discrete systems that need to managed, IT organizations increasingly think in terms of business processes that need to be automated. For example, the product manufacturing process needs to be improved, and in order to improve that business process IT needs to automate a series of functions that in turn touch anywhere from 10 to 100 applications.

To accomplish that, IT organizations are increasingly relying on middleware tools from vendor such as TIBCO in order to pull relevant data associated with a specific business process out of an application that is increasingly being viewed as little more than a convenient container for data.

In essence, this movement virtualizes applications by creating a higher set of abstractions that make it easier to access the data needed to run the business in real time. And once you start layering business intelligence tools on top of that process, you actually have the potential to reconcile all the data about the process into a single truth, rather than the disparate truths about the business that exist today when you compare the data that is in a CRM application at any one time with the data that resides in the general ledger of a supply chain application.

For lack of a better term, what we're really looking at here is the advent of Enterprise Computing 2.0. Given the fact that enterprise computing is over 30 years old, it may seen a little odd to be only talking about Version 2.0, but when you take all the buzzwords surrounding SOA, virtualization, software as a service, on-demand computing and utility computing, it pretty much adds up to complete reinvention of enterprise computing as we know it.