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208 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure

Conventional client operating system software is designed around the mouse
and keyboard, but increasingly becoming more natural and intuitive by using
touch technology. iOS, the operating system for the phenomenally popular
Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, features a multitouch interface, where
users employ one or more fingers to manipulate objects on a screen without a
mouse or keyboard. Microsoft's Windows 8, which runs on tablets as well as
PCs, has a user interface optimized for touch, but also works with a mouse and
keyboard.

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS

Firms worldwide are expected to spend about $301 billion in 2013 on software
for enterprise applications that are treated as components of IT infrastructure.
We introduced the various types of enterprise applications in Chapter 2, and
Chapter 9 provides a more detailed discussion of each.
The largest providers of enterprise application software are SAP and Oracle
(which acquired PeopleSoft). Also included in this category is middleware soft-
ware supplied by vendors such as IBM and Oracle for achieving firmwide inte-
gration by linking the firm’s existing application systems. Microsoft is attempting
to move into the lower ends of this market by focusing on small and medium-
sized businesses that have not yet implemented enterprise applications.

DATA MANAGEMENT AND STORAGE
Enterprise database management software is responsible for organizing and
managing the firm’s data so that they can be efficiently accessed and used.
Chapter 6 describes this software in detail. The leading database software
providers are IBM (DB2), Oracle, Microsoft (SQL Server), and Sybase (Adaptive
Server Enterprise), which supply more than 90 percent of the U.S. database
software marketplace. MySQL is a Linux open source relational database
product now owned by Oracle Corporation, and Apache Hadoop is an open
source software framework for managing massive data sets (see Chapter 6).
The physical data storage market is dominated by EMC Corporation for
large-scale systems, and a small number of PC hard disk manufacturers led by
Seagate and Western Digital.
Digital information is doubling every two years, with a staggering 1.8
zettabytes created in 2011 alone (IDC, 2011). All the tweets, blogs, videos,
e-mails, and Facebook postings, as well as traditional corporate data, add up to
thousands of Libraries of Congress.
With the amount of new digital information in the world growing so rapidly,
the market for digital data storage devices has been growing at more than 15
percent annually over the last five years. In addition to traditional disk arrays
and tape libraries, large firms are turning to network-based storage technologies.
Storage area networks (SANs) connect multiple storage devices on a separate
high-speed network dedicated to storage. The SAN creates a large central pool of
storage that can be rapidly accessed and shared by multiple servers.

NETWORKING/TELECOMMUNICATIONS PLATFORMS

Companies worldwide are expected to spend $408 billion for telecommuni-
cations equipment in 2013 and another $1.7 billion on telecommunications
services (Gartner, 2012). Chapter 7 is devoted to an in-depth description of the

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