On-Demand's Tire-Kickers

Computerworld - On-demand computing is a concept some IT managers have held up to the light and turned around a few times. But while the computing model has clearly captured their interest, they're not 100% sold on it. Like others in the IT field, they're taking a slow and cautious approach. In fact, industry experts say that while some users have already deployed applications that take advantage of utility computing for a specific function or business requirement, for most users, the road to on-demand will be an iterative process that will take years, if not up to a decade, to complete.

"I think we'll continue to see pilot projects in the short term over the next several years, with more enthusiasm and deployments building as more of the technologies necessary for utility computing come to market," says Jamie Gruener, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston. These developments include integrated data center automation and virtualization tools, easier-to-understand pricing models and improved capabilities to establish and maintain service levels across multiple technology layers within the data center. "It won't happen overnight," Gruener says, "but a number of larger customers have already begun the journey, with midsize customers starting to pilot programs this year and going forward."

Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., agrees that on-demand will be a gradual migration. "We will reach a point where applications won't have to sit on this particular server with this much memory," he says. "Instead, there will be a pool of applications, and you won't have to worry about which server is actually running it."

Computerworld talked with three CIOs who are examining the on-demand computing model. Here's what they had to say about what they hope it can deliver, what they're concerned about and what it will take to convince them.

Harry Roberts
Senior vice president and CIO, Boscov's Department Store LLC

• Computing environment: In addition to a z900 enterprise server, Boscov's data center houses an RS/6000 running customer resource management, business intelligence and data mining applications. It also has a server farm made up of IBM xSeries PCs. All of these systems are connected to two 3.2TB Shark storage-area networks (SAN) from IBM and support about 700 users. Outside the data center, there are 2,500 desktop PCs (mostly IBM), 3,500 point-of-sale devices and a number of Unix servers running in-store applications.

"We're trying to position ourselves to be more open-source-oriented so that we can move our software to whatever architecture we have spare capacity on," says Roberts. "We're not quite there yet, but we hope to be in a couple of years."