Moore's law—as we know it—just got a new lease of life. It's surprising that there has been so little discussion about this among the technorati.

Even though the original statement by Gordon Moore was: that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every 18 months, almost everyone thinks of Moore's law as the prediction that the performance of computers will double and the price will come down by 50 percent every 18 months. Amazingly, Gordon Moore's prediction has held for over 40 years. But, physics has been catching up with Moore's law and it has been under "threat" for at least the last five years because of the heat that's generated by faster chips with more and more transistors.

In my last two posts, I focused on the idea of virtualization and why it's popping up everywhere. Let me summarize my two major points:

1. Virtualization is the process of separating an apparent function (or capability) from the physical means through which it's produced.
   
   
2. We are seeing virtualization of hardware, software and business processes because of two major sources of capacity--technological and low-cost labor--that are poised to outstrip the overhead of abstraction layers introduced by virtualization.
   
   

There has been some important new developments with every one of these five that makes me believe that technological capacity--across all these dimensions--can be taken for granted moving forward.

What are the new impetuses (or is it impeti?) for this rampant virtualization—in everything from hardware to business processes?

Very simply: capacity.

You see, a monolithic design is considerably more efficient and cheaper than a design with layers and layers of abstraction. Although one could argue that abstraction layers make a design more understandable and can lead to reuse, from an operational standpoint, abstraction layers introduce communication—or more of a translation overhead from one layer to another. Until recently, the operational overhead of layered design—whether in hardware or business processes—was simply too high.

The term virtual and virtualization are back in play. In the '70s and early '80s, virtual memory and virtual machines emerged as powerful computer science concepts that are still part and parcel of the IT fabric. The '90s saw the emergence of the term "virtual enterprise" but the idea never really took off. Virtual has been really—should I say virtually—quiet for a while.

Suddenly, virtual is back in play these days. Server—and infrastructure—virtualization is hot. Business process virtualization is hot. With SaaS (software as a service), I'd argue software is being virtualized as well. What's virtualization and why is it back in play?