What was the most important tech story for global CIOs in 2010? In the view of InformationWeek's Bob Evans, it was the trend toward highly integrated hardware/software appliances. These optimized systems--from IBM, Oracle and others--increase performance and reduce the customers' integration and calibration chores.

"IBM invented them, Larry Ellison supersized them, SAP has revolutionized them, HP is promising them, and just about every single major IT vendor is rushing into the market for appliance-like systems that have shown great potential in redefining the types of business value that truly innovative IT can offer," Evans writes.

Originally aimed at niche uses, these hardware/software combination systems are now being marketed for myriad computing purposes, including data warehousing, analytics, business intelligence and security. They not only promise improvements in performance, speed, power and capabilities, but they also cut down on the amount of time IT groups have to deal with them.

While IBM pioneered the optimized system, Oracle aimed to improve on the concept "by rigorously engineering Oracle software in parallel with Sun hardware and software to achieve unprecedented levels of speed and throughput and power," Evans writes.

SAP upped the ante in November when it launched (along with hardware partners) Hana, an appliance for massive analytics computation. Hewlett-Packard also said that it planned to launch a series of purpose-built systems that leverage its hardware, software and networking products.

For more:
- see Bob Evans' article at InformationWeek

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