Database Sharding Blog

It's a common misconception that Google’s key intellectual property is its seemingly unique ability to delivery accurate search results. In fact, the patent for the famous PageRank algorithm is owned by Stanford University. Google listed the scalability of its vast infrastructure as its key asset during its Initial Public Offering.

Tim O’Reilly has explained that "it's not accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms."

The business value of this infrastructure is discussed in this month's Harvard Business Review (HBR) in a detailed article about Google innovation called “Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine”.

HBR explains:

Google has spent billions of dollars creating its Internet-based operating platform and developing proprietary technology that allows the company to rapidly develop and roll out new services of its own or its partners’ devising.

However, Google not only has infrastructure that allows it to add new on-line services quicker and easier than its competitors, it also has a management strategy that encourages staff to innovate by including it in job descriptions:

Much of what the company does is rooted in its legendary IT infrastructure, but technology and strategy at Google are inseparable and mutually permeable – making it hard to say whether technology is the DNS of its strategy or the other way around.

What would it mean for your organization if there were sufficient infrastructure resources to allow everyone to experiment with new ideas?

Labels: Application Scalability, Database Sharding, Google, Innovation, On-Line Applications, Scalability Architecture