Utility computing services redux

Despite all of its promises, until recently the concept of utility computing has gained only limited acceptance in the marketplace. There have been a variety of reasons for the slow adoption of this new approach to structuring corporate data center environments and desktop resources. But, now the tide appears to be turning and the utility computing services market appears to be primed for significant growth.

The promise of utility computing was most prominently promoted by the writings of Nicholas Carr in the Harvard Business Review, the MIT Sloane Management Review and his own book entitled, "Does IT Matter." Carr's indictment of traditional computing models was summed up best in his commentary in the Spring 2005 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review, "The End of Corporate Computing" in which he stated:

"...Imagine what future generations will see when they look back at the current time...won't the way corporate computing is practiced today appear fundamentally illogical -- and inherently doomed?"

Since that time, many companies have adopted a variety of blade, grid and other virtualized computing technologies to create more flexible and economical data center operations and desktop resources. But, Carr's vision, and that of other industry pundits, of a world in which organizations could acquire computing power by the MIP has not become a reality.

Despite IBM's early thought-leadership on the topic and Sun Microsystems' aggressively priced Grid Compute Utility, few companies were willing to replace their internal computing resources with third-party computing services. As I reported part of the problem was that these and other vendors were spending too much time promoting their own confusing, proprietary solutions rather than offering a simple set of useful services.

However, the rapid growth Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is breathing new life into the utility computing concept. I discovered over three years ago that many companies were adopting SaaS as an alternative to traditional, on-premise, legacy applications. In my commentary "Hosted Apps Top On-Demand Services", I wrote about a new generation of net-native software services led by Salesforce.com.

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