The enterprise has already gone through quite an evolution. Only a few years ago, the Information Technology department was merely a cost center, then a profit center, and now is a potential service provider for the enterprise and its partners. At the same time, the IT infrastructure has also evolved. Throughout this evolution, open systems have been crucial to technology innovation.

Open-systems computing recognizes that customers have individual needs that require varied levels of compute power and platforms. Today, businesses can ill afford to limit flexibility when deploying a technology infrastructure. In order to outpace rapid technology advancement and extreme competition, we need to continue promoting customer choice through open standards-based technologies and platforms that provide the right compute power and a choice of operating systems backed by mission-critical levels of support.

With open systems has come increased collaboration in product life-cycle management. Although companies have shared compute resources globally for some time, the Internet and emerging e-services have brought this collaboration to a new level. Geographically dispersed design and supply-chain teams are able to work collaboratively, creating new efficiencies and in many cases new opportunities to generate revenue.

We are now in the midst of a new evolution toward an even more collaborative, more open systems-design environment. "Pervasive computing" denotes the universal connectivity between not only different compute facilities but also between different compute resources, delivering as much compute capacity as a customer or internal design requirement demands. The need for this integration has never been greater, and open systems are the ideal way to help pervasive computing reach its potential.

The Internet can provide the infrastructure to connect diverse industry communities, bringing the term collaborative computing to an entirely new level. With open-standards-based eco-systems, design and manufacturing teams have platforms to create innovative products while meeting schedule and budget guidelines. Thus, a scalable, secure technical computing topology and architecture allows use of compute systems in the most economical way across an enterprise or customer base.

Open systems optimize collaboration between companies through easy access for all to the same set of standardized tools. Enterprises that can capture the competitive promise of pervasive computing will not only reap time and cost savings today, but also will be the market leaders of tomorrow.

JIm Zafarana is Worldwide Marketing Manager, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s technical computing division (Palo Alto, Calif.).