The single-system image is a reality. In the future, cheap and powerful workstation technology will be available to everyone—with truly distributed applications using processing power wherever it is available and providing information wherever it is needed. In the future, information will be available for use by owners and authorized users, without the constant need for professional systems developers and their complex programming languages. The future will bring information captured at its source and available immediately to authorized users.
The future will provide information from data in its original form: image, video, audio, graphics, document, spreadsheet, or structured data, without the need to be aware of specific software for each form. Successful organizations of the future—those that are market-driven and competitive—will be ones using client/server as an enabling technology to add recognized value to their product or service. The future is now for early adopters of technology. By the turn of the century, the enterprise on the desk will be the norm for all successful organizations. Laggards will not be price competitive, will not provide competitive customer services, and soon will cease to exist.