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IBM Wants CPU Time To Be A Metered Utility

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the from-my-cold-dead-fingers dept.

kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"

5 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. Revolution.... Mosix by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It will be a revolution until Linux becomes mainstream on the desktop and every computer on the corporate LAN is part of a cluster, when users log off the computer re-joins the cluster. Companies should look at what they already have before shelling out more money.

  2. Things are a little different now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    See, at that time ubiquitous networking was not a way of life. Also, software engineering was not as mature as it is now WRT to virtual machines, encapsulation, OO design, etc.

    Of course, all those technologies did exist then, but they can be counted on to be everywhere now. The reason mainframe timesharing gave way to PC's is because PC's could provide a more flexible and convenient sandbox to compute in, rather than the cumbersome interface of working with the mainframe in the company basement.

    These days returning to the idea of computing power as a fluid resource is a good idea because the landscape has changed and the world might actually be better prepared to accept the tradeoffs since the tradeoffs are much less significant now.

    1. Re:Things are a little different now. by n9hmg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've been a hired gun for IGS (IBM Global Services, the outside contracting arm). I'm probably not in the minority here. You know how they are with hourly billing stuff. The way to get ahead in IGS is to maximize your billable hours. Your greatest hotshot project manager had the internal nickname "the assassin", because she would get into a project and halt progress while dramatically increasing billable hours, sucking all the cash she could out of the customer, who got out of the contract as soon as they could, and she'd move on to a new one. We see the same sort of short-term thinking often in business. That Cringley story a few days ago (i can't find it... /. search is broken) gave a really nice analysis.
      This kind of utility is going to allow the "service providers" to obfuscate the costs of the service, much the way fiber providers keep their "dark" lines secret, for negotiation purposes. Also, they will require some sort of compliance with their systems, allowing them to dictate what sort of software runs on their system, thus giving them the opportunity to insert inefficiencies there, too. Unless they can arrange to lock people into this model somehow, it'll never work. Nobody wants to let a vendor control both the rate and volume purchased. If they try to push customers into this model, maybe by restricting the availability of their hardware to outside customers, most will just migrate to another platform.

  3. The ghost of Thomas Watson sr??? by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This must be a Hallowe'en story about the ghost of Thomas Watson sr....

    The last 35 years development in computers were precisely to move away from the "metered service" model which made IBM's fortune.

    On will recall that IBM's data-processing customers since the 1920's were charged by units of information stored/processed by the way of forcing customers to buy Hollerith (punch) cards solely from IBM, and run them in rented machines whose rental price was directly proportionnal to the throughtput of those (a card reader that processed 600 cards per minutes cost twice as much as one that processed 300, yet the only difference was the size of the pulley off the main motor - and you could upgrade by having an IBM tech that came and changed the pulley for a bigger one).

    So is it that the ghost of Thomas Watson sr has made a comeback to IBM's board of directors????

  4. It's revenue silly... by Usquebaugh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The revolution will be in revenue.

    Currently IBM big customers buy a new machine every four years or so, they pay a yearly maintenance bill. IBM has trouble predicting it's revenue quarter to quarter, in a downturn everyone stops capital expenditure and IBM mainframe sales plummet.

    Under this model everyone should pay less but they'll pay every month like clockwork.

    Computer Associates has a similar scheme for software. You rent your software on a monthly basis.

    On a technical level I'm all for it. I have a suite in my current site that is run yearly and takes for ever. Currently IBM has a big box sitting here and we just sip from it, until year end when we max it out for like two weeks. Let me rent time on a huge box and I'll be happy. Gurantee my data and response time and I'll be ecstatic.