Scalability – what’s all the fuss about?

Scalability seems to a popular topic these days. Personally I can’t see why it’s such an issue and I’m a touch sceptical as to whether most of the hubbub out there is pumped out by companies pushing scalability solutions. It’s not like a business wakes up one Tuesday and says, “hey, we’ve grown 2000% in the last 18 months – darn it, why didn’t we think about scalability planning.” Well, I mean, honestly now. For the record, I’m not talking about mergers and acquisitions either, that’s a different kind of scaling.

That said, you might reasonably argue that IT infrastructures for e-commerce and other web business services have the potential to catapult businesses forward, but is it really such a sensitive issue? I guess the world of Internet commerce is like no other in terms of high volume, high transaction activity – so maybe there is substance in this argument.

Seeking enlightenment, I spoke this week to a company in this space called Nimsoft. According to these guys it’s all down to monitoring and being able to be predictive about the likely loads that will be placed upon the IT infrastructure. They sport a product with an array of business reporting functions to offer customers predictive, historical and real time information to actively manage their Rich Internet Applications for web services. It’s a fair point I suppose; you don’t invite ten extra people to a drinks bash without ordering more Twiglets do you? (for want of a better analogy) Will we hear more about scalability in future then? Signs are that the answer is yes.