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206 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure

5.2 INFRASTRUCTURE COMPONENTS

IT infrastructure today is composed of seven major components. Figure 5.9
illustrates these infrastructure components and the major vendors within each
component category. These components constitute investments that must be
coordinated with one another to provide the firm with a coherent infrastructure.
In the past, technology vendors supplying these components were often in
competition with one another, offering purchasing firms a mixture of incom-
patible, proprietary, partial solutions. But increasingly the vendor firms have
been forced by large customers to cooperate in strategic partnerships with one
another. For instance, a hardware and services provider such as IBM cooper-
ates with all the major enterprise software providers, has strategic relation-
ships with system integrators, and promises to work with whichever database
products its client firms wish to use (even though it sells its own database
management software called DB2).

FIGURE 5.9 THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE ECOSYSTEM

There are seven major components that must be coordinated to provide the firm with a coherent IT infrastructure. Listed here are
major technologies and suppliers for each component.

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