Although it has been criticized by many analysts and experts who question its overall business model -- often wondering whether mainstream users would ever be comfortable running mission-critical jobs or services externally -- utility computing has not gone away.
In fact, if one were to ask around, he would very likely hear about a wide variety of utility solutions being offered by an equally varied group of vendors. If one were to dig a little deeper into these solutions, he would find that utility computing sure has matured since its early days of A offering B the ability to run jobs on A’s big collection of servers. Truth be told, “matured” might not be the right verb; it probably would be more accurate to say that, like so many technologies before it, utility computing has “evolved.”
And just like looking at the evolutionary paths of species whose current members have branched off into incarnations that barely (if at all) resemble their ancient ancestors, utility computing today takes many, sometimes unrecognizable, forms. However, unlike those species, the various incarnations of utility computing seek to do more than just survive -- they seek to transform the way the world does enterprise computing.
