BearingPoint, Inc., one of the world’s largest management and technology consulting firms, and Cassatt Corporation, a provider of software to run IT as a utility, today announced a global collaboration to help companies and government move their data centers to utility computing.

In one of the first moves under the cooperative effort, BearingPoint and Cassatt have opened a customer center in New York City that will allow financial services companies to model and test utility computing technologies and environments.

In many companies today, business applications reside in silos – each locked into dedicated servers and networks. What often results is over-provisioning, in which excess servers and switches are running at all times in anticipation of peak demand for an individual application, but sit underutilized at other times.

Utility computing solves this dilemma by decoupling software applications from their hardware, creating a bank of computing power. Utility computing solutions can then dynamically allocate that computing power to applications as needed, significantly increasing network flexibility and lowering costs of hardware, maintenance, operations, and even electricity. As a result, IT can better adapt to business changes at significantly reduced costs.

This collaboration brings together BearingPoint, provider of strategic consulting and technology solutions, and Cassatt, a software developer that makes utility computing possible by assigning resources to meet pre-defined service levels and then dynamically shifting those resources on the fly as conditions change.

The new BearingPoint-Cassatt “Utility Computing Customer Experience Center,” at 3 World Financial Center in New York, replicates a large corporate data center and is aimed at financial services companies that want to design, incubate, and test a next-generation computing infrastructure.

In addition, BearingPoint and Cassatt are working together with several Fortune 500 customers that have initiated utility computing projects with an initial focus on customers in the financial services, public sector, technology, communications, and media vertical markets.

“One of the biggest challenges facing the enterprise today is combating the continued habit of architecting IT infrastructure within silos,” said John Humphreys, program director for enterprise virtualization software at IDC. “These silos reduce overall computing efficiency, add a capital expense for every application deployed, and even contribute to increased data center power and cooling costs.

“Utility computing breaks these silos by creating resource pools that can be dynamically provisioned to any application,” Humphreys said. “Creating a policy-based IT environment can't be done on a leap of faith. The joint practice and customer experience center from BearingPoint and Cassatt are addressing this need and giving organizations a starting point for utility computing.”

“Utility computing is a game-changing proposition for our customers,” said BearingPoint Chairman Rod McGeary. “Properly deployed, utility computing can reduce infrastructure costs, leverage underutilized IT assets, help integrate disparate environments from mergers and acquisitions, improve IT service delivery, and even reduce electricity costs in data centers. That’s why we’ve made utility computing an important initiative at BearingPoint and why we allied with Cassatt. Cassatt’s technology shows that the tools for effective utility computing have arrived.”

“We believe that customers who run their IT as a utility will fundamentally reset the cost structures for operating their data centers – delivering the agility business requires today, but for half the cost,” said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt. “We’re placing significant focus on our practice with BearingPoint to help organizations worldwide capture these benefits and see immediate payback.”

“Our banking, global markets, and insurance customers increasingly look to us to provide guidance and direction as they investigate utility computing to address many issues within their data centers,” said Christopher Formant, executive vice president of Global Financial Services for BearingPoint. “The utility computing global collaboration with Cassatt will deliver automation, improved services, and cost savings while establishing a strategic, repeatable approach to IT for financial services organizations.”

The two companies are also engaged in joint marketing activities to highlight the benefits that large data centers can see from running IT as a utility, along with best practices for doing so.