The move by some companies to a compute on demand solution, a system where I say “I need 2000 servers with hosting and support, what’s the cost”, one where my involvement is to install my operating system, my layered components, and join it to my existing infrastructure.

There are many benefits in terms of flexibility, and most importantly the issues with hosting such a solution now become a managed service not an internal hosting issue for the IT teams.  What’s interesting though is we seem to be moving full circle back to the ‘olden days’ computing where i paid for a 1hr or 10 minute slice of the main frame to process my application.