For those who dont follow Jonathan Schwartz's, - SUN Microsystems COO's, blog, His post this week is on the subject(his present favourite) of "commodity business - computing",

In this weeks post he explicitly states that computing (& bandwidth) are commodities, and makes clear that computers are not, He draws parallel to the electricity domain, as he has often done in the past - - Analogy used electricity is a commodity, generators arent.

And looks like SUN is taking the first public/celebrated (IBM has been active in this space) step in making computing available as a commodity....Off the TAP.

SUN on Monday announced plans to offer remote computing resources to business customers, allowing them to purchase computing time over a network. This basically is similar to how we buy electricity / water through wires & pipes.

As indicated by Schwartz, one feature of a commodity is that it is available at a standard prize/quantity, well sun does this to computing they are saying it will cost clients $1 an hour or each micro processor used.

Well SUN is not restricted itself to COMPUTING, it is also providing storage at $1 a month for a gig of storage. MIND BLOWING! - i think i will go get my self an hour of computing & gig of storage...we will need to change our mindset now!!!..dont we?What does this do for customers?...What is the BugList* that this helps address?

• Avoid over paying and possibly over building ...are there servers in your farm which have below 10-20% utilization?
• Companies don't need to set up their own grids, also they can benchmark their grids against the cost of the one offered by SUN.
• A pain point for most CIOs today is the space in the data centre, storage requires a lot of space.
• Another one is two faced the electricity that needs to be provided & the exhaust system for the heat...imagine the things CIO's are having to worry about ...

This I am sure is going to be the topic of many future posts....let's watch.

*This if from the book "Art of Innovation -- Tom Kelly". As per the book maintaining a bug list is one of the primary steps to being innovative, Jonathan Schwartz seems to be an ace at keeping the list & understanding & communicating it as well.Prashanth Rai