Page 45 - ALCS Dubai

Supporting Notes

(1)Growth (exponential) in no. of connected devices (red line) especially looking into near-term future
(Cloud, Internet of Things, etc).

(2)Early systems were the provenance of business, so no. users determined by size of business (no. of
employees).

(3)Mainframe hardware & system software very expensive & no COTS (applications internally developed)
(4)Client/server allowed systems to be created on lower capacity/performance hardware and drove rapid

expansion through COTS and relational D/B but still mainly internally focussed
(5)Distribution of processing (to support growth/scale) brought additional complexity, more components

and more points of failure
(6)As PCs became commonplace and commoditised, necessary to support external access so

applications became “webified” but still mainly “composite” in nature (1 application doing multiple
processing tasks)
(7)Now evolving to much more fine-grained “applets” to enable decomposition of complex process and
web-scale deployment