Researchers See Steady Focus On Utility, On-Demand Computing

More vendors are investing to leverage future technologies that use on-demand infrastructures and utility computing, several top industry researchers said at a conference in New York in mid-November.

Research executives from IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Intel all described their efforts as customer-intensive, utility-based efforts that will roll out gradually in new products over time.

"We do a lot of customer work through IBM Research," said Alfred Spector, vice president of services and software at IBM Research. "That drives our thinking. When customers get interested, product groups get interested very quickly."

Spector said IBM continues apace with its efforts to roll out on-demand computing technology and pursues new functions in natural language and autonomic computing, among other features.

Rich Friedrich, director of the Internet Systems and Storage Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard Lab's Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center, said his company is also performing R&D on utility computing models.