[2] According to Dell Senior Vice President Brad Anderson, “Businesses requiring hyperscale computing environments – where infrastructure deployments are measured by up to millions of servers, storage and networking equipment – are changing the way they approach IT.”[3] While various Redshift proponents offer minor alterations on the original presentation, “Redshifting” generally includes:[1] These are companies that drive heavy Internet traffic.
A common anecdote claims that cutting the cost of computing by half causes customers in this segment to buy at least twice as much, because each marginal IT dollar spent contributes to business advantage.
[4][5] Redshift theory suggests that traditional computing markets, such as those serving enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management applications, have reached relative saturation in industrialized nations.
According to International Data Corporation vice president Matthew Eastwood, "IDC believes that the IT market is in a period of hyper segmentation...
This a class of customers that is Moore's law driven and as price performance gains continue, IDC believes that these organizations will accelerate their consumption of IT infrastructure.”[7] Key portions of Papadopoulos' theory were first presented by Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz in late 2006.
Papadopoulos originally depicted traditional IT markets as green to represent their revenue base, but later changed them to “blueshift,” which occurs when a light source moves toward an observer, similar to what would happen during a contraction of the universe.