Use It Or Lose It

At one point in the evening, the conversation turned to "human capital," the term Red Hat uses to refer to its workforce. Szulik's term intrigued me, not only because it is used less often than "human resources" but because it has a whole different connotation. Webster's may quibble the point, but to me, resources are something you use, and capital is something that,if you invest in it,produces some kind of beneficial return.

The same notion can be applied to information technology, and my mind began racing. Up until now, most businesspeople have thought of IT as an expense, something you procure. But that line of thinking is changing dramatically.

These days a company's IT infrastructure needs to be just as flexible as the human team that runs the company. Just as a manager would redeploy team members during crunch time on a product launch or during a key selling season, computing power should be reassigned where it's needed,instead of sitting in silos.

This, of course, is the whole strange and wondrous holy grail surrounding the notion of "on demand." The fact is, however, that on-demand computing won't work without the right software and systems to help monitor the technology associated with certain processes and reallocate it on the fly when preassigned service levels are surpassed or breached.

Little wonder there has been a recent slew of posturing and positioning activity lately surrounding tools inching their way toward supporting this idea. In the past 10 days alone, I've talked to Mercury Interactive, Managed Objects, Tibco and their various partners about this topic. One integrator even went so far to describe this sort of technology as "ERP for IT." Much bigger fish also have a vested interest in this area, including Computer Associates International, Hewlett-Packard and IBM (see story on page 5).

We're entering a period of massive IT reinvention. Solution providers who show customers how to capitalize on existing IT more wisely will be rewarded accordingly.

What does "on demand" mean to you? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, welcomes your feedback at [email protected].