As an industry, we have moved IT from a back office function supporting accounting and manufacturing at the beginning of the last decade to a C level post. Even sales and marketing don’t have C level posts. However, that rapid growth has created a nightmare of complexity within IT. Simply put, IT is saturated and as a result applications are taking too long to get into production in order to respond to dynamic market conditions.

Three trends drive this complexity and they all began during the late 90’s. The first, of course, is the internet which transformed the nature of applications. Instead of hundreds of trained users in the enterprise we now expect tens of thousands of end users with no familiarity with our systems. Second, is the shift from vertically integrated computing platforms (think Sun and IBM) to commodity servers. Large system vendors spent billions ensuring all that their components worked together and we all leveraged that work. Commodity servers shift the integration effort to IT, and it must be repeated for every application. Last, surprisingly to some, is the move to open source software. While open source provides a great deal of flexibility, and of course costs nothing, it invariably requires greater effort to place into service than commercial equivalents.

Utility computing offers a solution to this problem. Infrastructure and software integration work can be packaged and reused in a fashion impossible today. And while the labor savings alone will be staggering, the real difference will come from improving the time to market of applications. Changes to applications can be made and tried in a day instead of weeks or months. IT can become nimble and respond to business conditions in near real-time.