Michael Capellas, the chairman and CEO of Compaq Computer, said Monday that the recent slowdown in the economy has made it even more apparent to developers that computing applications must be made to operate across multiple platforms
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In a keynote address at the WinHEC 2001 conference here, Capellas also said that Compaq is rapidly working toward hyper-dense servers that can number as many as 280 servers to a rack.
WinHEC is Microsoft's annual hardware developer's conference.
"We are really starting to see that [the drop in] Internet stocks has taken the hype out of the Internet," said Capellas, who added that the focus for developers was now on the creation of more pervasive applications.
"There's a shift in e-business values," said Capellas. "It used to be when you developed the application, you knew where it was going, but now that application could be headed towards a handheld device or even a computer on board a car," Capellas said.
Because of this, Capellas said the industry has begun to see another layer of services added on to traditional applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning), messaging, and database applications. Those services include application hosting, authentication, and content distribution, Capellas said.
"[As developers,] we are now going forward in assuming [that new applications] will be networked," said Capellas. "The applications will reside on multiple nodes of the network, delivered to any form factor."
To assist in this move towards more pervasive, distributed computing, Capellas said Compaq is committed to both the deployment of the new Windows XP operating system and the trend toward hyper-dense servers.
Capellas said that by reducing power consumption and shrinking size, Compaq hopes to deliver servers so small that as many as 280 servers can sit in a single, standard rack.
