Thoughts from ISPCON: Three Different Paths Towards the Next Big Thing

I spent most of this afternoon walking around the exhibit hall. The three most talked-about products seem to be:

1. 3Tera's AppLogic Grid OS (disclaimer: I recently joined the company's advisory board)

2. Righteous Software's backup software (disclaimer: Founder and CEO David Wartell has been a long-time friend)

3. Cleversafe's dispersed storage solution (disclaimer: I haven't looked into Cleversafe at all, but John Martis from Hostway and Will Charnock from The Planet both said it's "just the kind of thing I'd be into".)

These solutions have two things in common.

First, the share the goal of making the web hosting world a safer place. 3tera eliminates downtime - whether unplanned hardware-failure-associated outages or scheduled maintenance for infrastructure upgrades. Righteous Software makes data loss obsolete with affordable, nearly-continuous incremental backups, even on open files. And Cleversafe offer dispersed storage across not one, not two, but 11 different locations.

Second, all three are software solutions. As British Telecom CTO Matt Bross puts it, we're in a software world; we've got to stop thinking hardware. Nicholas Carr is even more blunt; he says software kills hardware:

Consider the telephone answering machine. It began as a bulky analogue box running spools of tape. It turned into a small digital box, often incorporated into a phone. And finally it disappeared altogether, turning into pure software running out somewhere on a phone company's network. Once you bought an answering machine. Now you buy an answering service. And so it goes.

3tera CEO Vlad Miloushev said during his panel today that more than 80% of all servers in the world are maintained by in-house IT departments. This means the web hosting industry has enormous expansion potential, particularly since AFCOM's research shows that 50% of corporate data centers will become obsolete within the next 5 years. At the same time, increasing adoption of hosted versus desktop software will drive just about every software developer in the world into the hosting market.

We'll get all that business, and we'll service it securely, reliably and seamlessly - with innovative software solutions rather than bigger and costlier gear. That's what I see as the next big thing.

PS - There was actually a 4th thing that I found super impressive. Ivaylo Lenkov from SiteKreator mentioned quite casually that he's hosting 20,000 to 30,000 sites per Dual Xeon server. Wow - now that's a profitable operation!