As a result, many vendors are selling what might be thought of as "outsourced utility computing," in which they provide resources over the Internet, matching delivery to demand at least semiautomatically, perhaps through a webpage. One appeal of such services is their level of automation. Mobil Travel Guide is developing a complicated new mapping service, Mobil Companion, that will support a high level of interactivity between travelers and facilities such as hotels, parks and museums. (For instance, tourists planning a journey will be able to buy tickets and make reservations along their intended route with a few clicks.) But the service will be intensely transactional and prone to unpredictable peaks. "I needed a whole new architecture," says CIO Paul Mercurio, "but I also needed to focus my development team and spend my money on the product, not on building the network." So in October 2002, Mercurio started buying networking resources from another virtual utility computing service, Virtual Linux Server, also from IBM.

Unlike AmEx's Salow, Mercurio is willing to accept a higher degree of dependence on his vendor. He says his level of comfort springs in part from his background in travel reservation services, which have been using utility computing like services for years - travel companies generally pay for resources not by reserving blocks of capacity ahead of time (and still less by wiring in hardware) but by the transaction. Mercurio expects utility computing to move to that same model. "In 10years we won't be needing database administrators," he speculates. "Each transaction will just buy the resources it needs."

Some companies even plan to move almost entirely to the outsourced utility computing model. Recently, Inpharmatica, a British pharmaceutical company, finished participating in a utility computing pilot program just launched by Gateway. "Two to three years ago, we built a 2,300-plus processor compute farm with 25 terabytes of storage," says Inpharmatica CIO Pat Leach. "Building it was very interesting stuff, but we are a drug discovery company, not an IT shop. We would much rather employ people to do innovative analysis than spend time building computers. As demand exceeds capacity, I hope to use compute-on-demand to top up and eventually replace our computer farm."

Profitable Utility

Utility computing by its nature is antagonistic to the idea of drawing a high contrast line between local and external resources; if all resources are interoperable, a transaction should never need to know whether the processing it buys comes from inside or outside. Keith Morrow, CIO of 7-Eleven, buys processing cycles and storage capacity from EDS. However, he plans to extend the concept internally by offering the same relationship to 7-Eleven's divisions, departments and franchisees. He would like to buy processing cycles and storage capacity from EDS, use those to support application processes, and then sell access to those processes internally on a per-transaction basis. The end user would not know - and have no reason to know - he was buying a composite product. (Morrow is moving a step closer in another respect: He lets his system buy its own storage; all he asks is that his network send him a monthly report detailing its purchasing decisions. He still orders processing manually, since that resource comes in pricier units.)

The idea of IT becoming a profit center may seem strange, but it seems like an inevitable consequence of the transition to utility computing. Gateway, for instance, has a tremendous number of demo machines and training workstations doing nothing in hundreds of stores, most of which have T1 data lines already hooked up. Recently the company connected about 8,000 of those machines (using a United Devices' MetaProcessor platform) into the previously mentioned on-demand service that can deliver an astonishing 14 teraflops, making it one of the faster machines in the world. (One of the advantages of buying processing from computer vendors is that as they upgrade their stock, that performance number will rise automatically.) According to Bob Burnett, executive vice president and CTO of Gateway, its big concern was having the retail side of operations be completely unaffected. "We were striving for an obtrusiveness of zero," he says - and he got it.