FORRESTER RESEARCH DEFINES ORGANIC IT, THE NEXT CORPORATE COMPUTING
REVOLUTION

***Organic IT Presents CXOs With A New, Holistic Way To Think About
Technology Investments And Deployment***

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands,  20 June 2002 . . . In 1987, Forrester Research
(Nasdaq: FORR) presciently coined the term "client/server" to describe a
massive shift in how companies would deploy technology. Fifteen years
later, fundamental technology trends have already begun to create a new
corporate technology architecture shift that Forrester calls Organic IT.
Unlike the rip-and-replace nature of the client/server revolution, Organic
IT will enable global companies to squeeze 50 percent more value from sunk
technology investments inside their datacenter, commoditizing some
technologies, lowering internal management costs, and increasing business
flexibility and response. Meanwhile, the shift to Organic IT will drive
brutal vendor transformations as vendors begin revamping their products now
through 2004.

To learn more about Organic IT, Forrester's VideoView of this new report is
available at:
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/Summary/0,1338,14136,FF.html

Organic IT Defined
Organic IT is not one set of technologies; it consists of four independent
technology developments, which will converge between 2002 and 2006.
Forrester defines Organic IT as computing infrastructure built on cheap,
redundant components that automatically shares and manages enterprise
computing resources -- software, processors, storage, and networks --
across all applications within a datacenter.

"Global 3,500 firms have spent the last 40 years thinking in technology
silos, being incapable of sharing underused resources across like networks,
servers, storage, and software infrastructure," said Frank E. Gillett,
principal analyst at Forrester. "Organic IT is based on the principle that
shared resources is a good thing. It will overhaul all the backroom
technology from top to bottom, unifying these silos into a coherent,
flexible whole."

How Organic IT Tackles The Technology Deployment Dilemma
Organic IT attacks three key problems that firms face in deploying
technology today:

·    Low use. Organic IT scales up and down to match demand -- with no
sudden failures of business capacity -- similar to the reliability and
efficiency of the electrical grid or the telephone network.
·    Expensive integration. Organic IT quickly and easily connects
dissimilar technologies within and between firms, with the ease of sending
email or visiting a Web site.
·    Complex manageability. Organic IT automates installation, load
balancing, failover, and recovery, leaving IT administrators free to manage
unusual exceptions.

Organic IT Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Four Parts
To quickly adjust and respond to changing business conditions, IT shops
need abstracted infrastructure to manage the datacenter as a whole rather
than as a collection of parts. Abstraction is the result of technology
improvements that simplify controls and conceal complexity behind a simple
interface.

For instance, automobile engines used to require hand-cranked starts,
manual choke adjustments of air/fuel mixture, and constant roadside tweaks.
Drivers today just turn a key and press the accelerator, and the engine
systems manage all the details.

Organic IT incorporates the principles of abstraction in an exceptional way
to radically overhaul and automate the four key elements of computing
infrastructure:

·    Networks. Today's networks are fragmented in a complicated tangle of
software, hardware, and providers. Organic IT will enable firms to safely
replace expensive, leased equipment with a cheaper, more reliable redundant
array of Internet links (RAIL), resulting in fewer business interruptions.
·    Storage. Instead of managing disks scattered across the network,
Organic IT will enable a shared storage pool that is accessible from any
server, at a cost savings of 30%. In fast-changing business situations,
firms will benefit from this flexibility in storage capacity.
·    Processors. Organic IT will create a new generation of server
infrastructure comprising cheap processor/memory nodes that are shared
easily across applications on a network computing fabric. This yields an
infrastructure that can adjust computer power for unpredictable business
circumstances.
·    Software. Today's software doesn't communicate well with other
applications. Organic IT will use Web services standards to enable software
developers to bridge disparate apps, taking a huge chunk out of today's $6
million-plus integration budgets over the next four years.

When operating together, these four elements will create integrated
infrastructure benefits greater than the sum of its parts, while meeting
the needs of business line managers, such as response to business
situations at the speed of software and one point of contact for IT
resources and provisioning.

More Organic IT Research Coming Soon
For the report "Organic IT" Forrester interviewed both users and vendors of
server hardware, network hardware, management software, and
high-performance computing, as well as industry experts on Web services.

In the coming months, Forrester will continue to explore what the Organic
IT voyage will mean for technology users, vendors, and outsourcers. For
instance, Forrester's report "Making Storage Organic" focuses on how Global
3,500 firms can abstract storage from the physical disk infrastructure with
virtualization technology.