Nicholas Carr presents on Utility Computing

Nick Carr has graciously put up his slides from the pitch he made at the Open Source Business Conference. Less about open source, more about his vision for utility computing. (for my post on Oracle/Sleepycat click here)

I have never disagreed with his view of utility computing. The concept of giving up private "generators" and moving to centralized, shared, efficient utilities makes sense.

Where I continue to disagree with him on is whether IT Utilities are today, or will be tomorrow, more efficient than private, CIO driven "generators"

As I wrote in Utility Computing - Wish it was so easy

"EDS has over 100,000 employees. The average Fortune 500 CIO has 500 IT employees. Infosys has delivered over 18,000 projects using its GDM. The average CIO has done fewer than 10.  Microsoft spent $ 6 billion in R&D last year. The average Fortune  500 CIO's total IT budget (not just on software) is less than $ 50 m. Yet vendors cannot price their products or deliver performance on a utility scale model? How much more scale do they need?"

While SaaS models are being priced reasonably, and showing signs of reliability as utilities, overall private IT "generators" have a long life left yet. IT Utilities are still not priced right and need to dramatically improve delivery reliability. If each of us had to negotiate that hard and spend that much time monitoring our electric, water, gas, lawn service - our utilities -  we would have little budget or time left for anything else.