Increasing Functional Specificity over Increasingly Commoditized Hardware - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 29

1.7 Summary
This chapter provides a bird's eye view of the dominating trend of the last
50 years in the computer industry, namely, increasing functional specificity
over increasingly commoditized hardware. The first half of the chapter pres-
ents an overview of the evolution from Grid Computing through Parallel
Processing to Symmetric Multiprocessing Systems toward Massive Parallel
Processing using commoditized hardware. The latter part of the chapter
traces the evolution from batch Materials Requirement Planning to the cur-
rent Extended Enterprise Systems incorporating Web Services and SOA. In
the following parts, the topic presents the genesis, roadmap, and character-
istics of Cloudware, that is, the cloud computing area. The last part of the
topic describes Cloudware Applications in the areas of big data, mobile, and
context-aware systems.