Hardware, along with the network, provides the physical platform for eBusiness solutions. The term hardware^[1] refers to objects that you can actually touch, like disks, disk drives, display screens, keyboards, printers, boards, chips, and multimedia devices.
One is useless without the other. The hardware design specifies the commands it can follow, and the instructions tell it what to do.

There are four categories of hardware:

1. Servers
2. Personal Computers (PCs)
3. Handheld devices
4. Peripherals

When looking at changes that e-business and commerce make one of the biggest areas where we need new science and thinking is when we consider how people work now and in the future. A decoupling has evolved between where people work and the physical location of where they carry out their work. With domestic broadband, intranet/extranets and email, many people work at home or at a chosen location that is not the traditional workplace. The cost of arranging a virtual meeting with the special hardware involved to allow for video conferencing were high, but now we can do it with equipment bought from a high street outlet and using internet video conferencing for very little actual cost. The freedom and the comfort this affords are incentives for the worker, the cutting of costs and the move to shorter contracts are incentives for the employer.
We will explore each of these categories as they relate to eBusiness in this FlipBook.

Webserver Mainframes
In sum, there are a wide variety of hardware components to any eBusiness solution. The next lesson demonstrates how to assess these hardware elements when choosing them for your solution.

Click the link below to test your knowledge of the different categories of hardware.
Hardware Components

[1]Hardware: Machinery and equipment such as CPUs, disks, tapes, modems, and cables. In operation, a computer is both hardware and software.