Utility Computing Buzz

Computerworld - There's an old newsroom joke that once you've spotted three of something, you've got a trend. So when IBM CEO Sam Palmisano sketched out Big Blue's big vision of "autonomic" computing last week, it was official: IBM, Sun and HP have joined the trendy utility-computing club. This latest fashion in self-healing, self-managing IT environments also answers to buzzwords like grid computing, network resource provisioning and data center virtualization.
Later this month, HP will roll out its Utility Data Center architecture, which will bulk up its OpenView management software products with more network-mapping capabilities and a ream of service offerings from partners. Sun recently unveiled its N1 data center virtualization plans, aiming to automate computing administration tasks by pooling resources such as servers, storage and networking gear.
Fundamentally, the trio is trying to sort out the tangled complexities of managing the distributed computing environments they each had a share in creating in the first place. In calling its approach autonomic computing, IBM has repurposed a medical term coined in 1898 and usually associated with involuntary activities of the nervous system. Interesting marketing challenges lie ahead on that one, I suspect.
But the much bigger challenge will be in convincing senior IT managers and CIOs to buy into this futuristic vision that - taken to its utility metaphor extremes - could make their jobs irrelevant. I saw this realization hit home last week at a CIO gathering in New York, where Palmisano's pronouncements caught everyone's attention. One CIO from a Fortune 10 company summed up the threat that utility computing poses by pointing out that once computing services can be delivered like electricity via an outlet in the wall, "we're all out of a job."
Do you know any chief electricity officers? Me neither.
Now, I'm sure it's just a wild coincidence that this shared vision of utility computing would enable the Big Three to sell you massive amounts of software and services. IBM, Sun and HP executives don't talk about pricing or licensing costs when they're busy being visionaries, of course.
But they've done their math, and they've calculated a bleak bottom line, since they can't count on hardware sales to roar back. IBM, for example, expects the share of its profits that hardware sales account for to sink from 58% in 2000 to 42% by 2005. Software and services, however, are expected to rise briskly, from 29% of profits in 2000 to 41% in 2005. Trends in IT spending over the past decade confirm that software and services are rising