Let’s just look it right in the eye and call it out. We in the IT industries have been barraged with the buzzwords over and over again since we rolled into the new millennium: the transition to utility computing, or grid computing, or cloud computing (depending on the source/exact month/position of the stars in the sky). We’ve decided that we’ve hit fatigue in all of this, and there’s nothing we can do about the language and jockeying for position that accompanies all of the PR.

But, underneath it all, a real transition has been taking place, based on real pressures in the global economy to leverage technology for business advantage, while suppressing costs and increasing reliability. This evolution can be characterized by the fulfillment of the promise of distributed computing (a whole room of commoditized computers, instead of one massive Cray); the move away from desktop applications to perform day-to-day tasks, and the move to the supremacy of the browser-as-everything-you-will-ever-need; and the rise of standards-based, open interfaces between computing elements. That’s just for starters, but it’s leading to innovations that help our companies get more from their data, more from their networks, and ultimately more productivity and innovation from their people.

So, people can look at it and brand it Grid, or Utility, and so on, but those of us who’ve been involved in it for the past decade understand the fundamental truth: the current technology landscape is one big wild mess.

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