It's noon on Friday and you just found out that your relatives are coming to spend the weekend. It's time to contact the electric company to let them know that you will need extra electricity for the weekend. You're told you have to fill out a purchase order and it will be five to seven days before you can get extra electricity.

Of course, basic utilities have extra capacity built into their delivery systems, but this would be a likely scenario if you were to find out at noon on Friday that you were expecting a major spike in usage on your servers. You'd have to call your provider, do a bunch of paperwork, and maybe in a few days you could get the extra capacity you need. That's the kind of problem that utility computing solves.

Rather than having a fixed amount of computing resources, you would have access to computing resources on an as-needed basis-just like with electricity.

Summit Strategies describes utility computing this way:

"Utility computing consists of a virtualized pool of 'self-managed' IT resources that can be dynamically provisioned via policy-based tools that ensure these resources are easily and continually reallocated in a way that addresses the organization's changing business and service needs. These resources can be located anywhere and managed by anyone, and the usage of these resources can be tracked and billed down to the level of an individual user or group."

Utility computing (also called "on-demand computing") has become one of the hot topics in the IT community and, increasingly, in larger enterprises that are looking for ways to reduce the fixed costs and complexity of IT. Gartner Dataquest believes that the advent of "utility" as a business model will "fundamentally challenge the established role of channels for suppliers of all types.

"Three major reasons why utility computing tools will become the next big thing

• Promise to address pressing business needs, including making the business more agile and able to treat IT as an increasingly variable cost.
• Can be supplied in small, incremental bites that deliver fast, demonstrable, significant return on investment, so companies don't have to wait for the full implementation to achieve payoffs.
• Provide total flexibility in implementation, from in-house and self-managed to fully outsourced, with everything in between-including a hybrid deployment model in which in-house capacity can be supplemented by third-party resources to handle peak needs.

We are in business…
To establish and operate a world-class utility service that profoundly changes how information technology services are delivered, enabling our customers to fundamentally improve the way they conduct business. We remove the excess costs related to IT through:

• Standardization of commodity services and demand aggregation coupled with next generation service delivery.
• Our unique collaborative Governance model redefines how IT services are created and managed.
  
• These techniques free up IT budget dollars that can be used to make IT more strategic, adding value to your business, providing your company with a competitive advantage.

Contact us to learn if this new concept could be exactly what you've been looking for to reduce the fixed costs and complexity of IT.