Vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and HP use terms as diverse as ‘on demand’, ‘agile business’, ‘grid computing’ and ‘adaptive infrastructure’ to describe their visions of utility computing, but the general push is similar, even if the rhetoric is different.
In short, utility computing is the practice of moving from a relatively inflexible, silo-based, application-focused environment dependent on specific hardware/software configurations, to a flexible, scalable environment based around functional services that can be provisioned across an existing infrastructure as business needs change.
For the single, underpinning software framework to support the utility vision, the market has come up with the vision of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which should be great news. Why? Because we should be able to get the same, simple message from every vendor on the kinds of technologies we need to have in place to support business processes.
