The comparison with unidentified flying objects, which host Werner Lauff used to open the annual IT 2004 conference on July 7 and 8 in Mainz, Germany, proved particularly apt over the course of the event. It remains to be seen where some of the IT trends for debate presented by the German magazine Wirtschaftswoche will end up - if they end up anywhere. The prediction from Ovum manager Dr. Katharina Grimme - that utility computing (the dynamic provision of IT resources with invoicing dependent on usage) will become more attractive to hardware providers - is as much of an unknown as the future of "organic IT." Experts associate organic IT with the challenge of reorganizing IT architecture to create variable business services from reusable modules - but doing it without monolithic software, purpose-specific computing power, isolated memories, or fragmented networks. The goal is organic business: integrating value-adding business services with the constant availability of customer and supplier processes.
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