One of the tougher transition issues is not technical at all, but cultural and political. A general introduction of charge-by-use will almost inevitably disrupt established chargeback practices. In most organizations, IT has tried to stay out of the highly volatile business of taking money away from people.

"You go into an organization, and IT will tell you, 'We don't do chargebacks - accounting takes care of that.' They're thinking of themselves as technical people, not businesspeople," says Kevin Vitale, CEO of Ejasent, which makes utility computing tools. Vital expects utility computing to change that, not just because it produces a specific, very detailed invoice, but because IT generates the bill. "CIOs are going to have to wrestle with issues of chargeback fairness," he says. "They are going to have to start thinking of information technology as a business resource, not just as something to be kept in running order." Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing for HPHP, puts the point this way: "IT people will be people who manage services as opposed to people who work with wires and boxes." Alles zu HP auf CIO.de

Moving to Utopia

It is worth noting that all this energy is being devoted to merely a halfway version of utility computing. Down the road the utility computing relationship will not be with a certain vendor or a specific mainframe but with the whole Internet. Every piece of the network will participate in a huge free market, buying and selling what it needs as it needs it. CIOs will come to work to find hard drives and RAM that their systems bought through eBay. IT will become a revenue stream, selling itself overnight to buyers in other time zones.

Perhaps that vision is in part a fantasy, though a recent experiment by HP, in which the company implemented its utility computing software on the Grid (a worldwide research network specifically designed to explore ideas in large-scale distributed computing) seems like a big step in that direction. And if it is only a fantasy, it is at least along-standing one. For years, information scientists have been suggesting that without such a flexible and bottom-up system of provisioning, the growing complexity of networks will eventually consume exponentially larger amounts of resource and management time. Since there seems to be no end to increased complexity, it follows that we will eventually find our way, like it or not, to pure utility computing.