Utility computing means different things to different people. As the industry association Utility Computing notes: "It is easy to get more confused as to what each vendor means by utility computing. Some are referring solely to data-centre sharing, some process provisioning and some offer a pure pay-as-you-go financing option for outsourcing. Despite the terminology battles beginning to subside, we still don't have a unified message from the vendors."

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Savvis' European MD Richard Warley said that the industry is in the early stages of utility computing. "There's a long way to go but progress is being made as enterprises still need to improve the efficiency of their services. So essentially, IT departments call us because they want to do more with less. It's about being more, flexible, and offering better value by arbitraging the unused computing cycles. All hardware vendors and their customers are saying that they need to move to virtualisation to increase utilisation."

What's changed from the old ASP days -- and which makes this a step change for Warley -- is the advent of three key issues: improved connectivity, better management software and the advent of virtualisation. "For us the advantage is increased utilisation", says Warley. "But that’s also true for the customer. They can use the system when they want, as much as they want. Today, money will talk: it doesn’t make sense to buy your own infrastructure even though there's an emotional issue there with having your own IT system.