The Evolvement of Classical IT Business Models
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The Evolvement of Classical IT Business Models
“
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas J. Watson, 1943, Founder & CEO of IBM
While this statement from the former IBM chief executive could have been taken for
granted in the early 1940ies, nowadays the IT landscape vastly changed and
computers have become an integral part of our daily lives and an essential
ingredient for efficient business processes. Independently from the industry sector
the company acts in, they find themselves in an environment comprising an
enormous amount of data, evolving IT technologies and a fast changing market, that
requests constant attention in order to keep pace with. In an era of globalization,
separate IT systems operating in quarantine do not work anymore. Contemporary
businesses often rely on activities beyond the geographical boundaries of one
country. Hence an IT infrastructure is requested, which enables companies to
communicate on an international scale, which is flexible and reliable, as well as it
should provide possibilities to extract useful information from a fuzzy picture of Big
Data (Lambin, 2008, pp. 55-58) & (Liu & Bindiganavale, 2007, pp. 16-20).
3.1
From ARPA and Minitel to the Modern Internet
Computer engineers and governmental institutions early realized the importance of
having an IT infrastructure capable of communicating with remote networks for the
purpose of information exchange. The use of computers solely as individual entities
to operate in an isolated environment without any possibility of external
communication has been abandoned with the development of Advanced Research
Project Agency (ARPA) in the US and Minitel in Europe.
