EDS Makes Utility-Computing Pitch

The systems integrator is the latest in a series of industry bigwigs to talk about the utility concept, which charges customers only for the computing power they consume, ostensibly saving them money on maintenance, hardware and IT support.

EDS' utility computing vision includes services for hardware infrastructure, such as hosting, metering the amount of processing power a client uses, and automating the management of clients' heterogeneous computing environments.

Partners such as Ejasent and Opsware, the former Loudcloud, are supplying technology for some of these services, EDS said.

The second leg of the services giant's utility approach is using Web services to create standardized enterprise applications, regardless of the platform on which they run. EDS also is making available a range of managed credit-card and invoice processing, customer-relationship and financial-management services.

EDS is positioning these services, many of which are not new, as a means for customers to save money, increase the efficiency of computing resources and improve end-user productivity.