If all the vendor noise about utility computing sounds to you like a bunch of traveling televangelists promising to heal your budget woes, place end users under your sway and raise the dead to boot, read on.
Utility computing is the industry's answer to CFO Lament No. 1: "IT costs too much, is unresponsive and is impossible to measure by the usual business metrics."
What utility computing definitely is not now--nor will it ever be--is a real utility service. Information technology can't be purchased like water. Period. Rather, utility computing represents the evolution of the IT industry.
In the next few months and years, look for vendors to deliver systems and software that are more flexible, more self-healing and more manageable. Servers and storage systems will continue on their trek toward modularity. Management software will do a better job of showing how resources are being used and will off-load some of the tedious, error-prone, time-consuming tasks that currently weigh down IT staffs.
Unfortunately, the more heterogeneous your IT infrastructure, the harder these goals will be to achieve. On the systems side, Hewlett-Packard and IBM are showing the best understanding of this challenge. Software companies like Veritas Software also have a good story to tell. Vendors whose value proposition is tightly tying proprietary hardware to proprietary software will continue to be less attractive.
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