Balancing time-to-market against asset utilization is too challenging: between controlling IT spend and being responsive to business, IT is stuck in a catch-22 situation. The old 'just give them a server' doesn't fly anymore.

The business wants a quick and dirty way to prototype: the business often comes to IT with requests that don't have budget approval or lack a fully-baked business case, hoping IT can squeeze them in. And IT can't afford to set up and manage an outside-facing play area -- especially with today's security imperatives.

In his report Staten quotes Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, who says that the very best at datacenter management holds the solution to the problem of IT shops being unable to respond on time to dynamic business needs.

Leading Web services companies have built their businesses around innovative approaches to IT infrastructure that maximize datacenter efficiency -- investments that have given them a distinct advantage over competitors that came to Web services from a traditional IT foundation, says Staten. This led Vogels to conclude that if managing a massive data center isn't a core competency of your business, then maybe you should pass the responsibility to someone who has:

One: vastly superior economics. The leading providers of Internet apps and services -- whether their own or as a hosting provider -- buy so much datacenter equipment that they have an enormous amount of negotiating power.

Two: better practices for handling dynamic workloads. The leading Internet services companies have invested not only in better processes, but have also built management and administration tools that let them spread applications across thousands of servers and scale them quickly. They have optimized their infrastructures to accommodate new services quickly and without disruption, letting them introduce new capabilities every week.

Three: expertise in dynamic capacity management. For these companies, the productivity of their assets is paramount, as the cost of their services is directly proportional to the ongoing costs of the datacenter. The more productivity they can wring from each square foot, the higher their profitability. Thus, they closely monitor the infrastructure consumption of each app.

Four: consumption-based cost tracking. It is the tight mapping of IT consumption by application that determines the margins on the services they provide. For most of these companies, this reporting is internal, but for an innovative few, this tracking is starting to be exposed as a new kind of offering.

Three streams of evolution are occurring in the enterprise IT space at almost the same time. The first is in supercomputing, which according to Staten, is moving from extremely large, single systems to clusters of inexpensive systems, and is being redefined as high performance computing (HPC). It is now entirely x86-based systems in large quantities grouped together with parallel computing technologies.