Now that IBM is committed to utility-based, on-demand computing, the company is making sure it really understands the model. Beginning Jan. 1, IBM is putting Linda Sanford, who heads up its storage division, in charge of rolling out utility computing internally.

Sanford's customer counterpart is technology and strategy VP Irving Wladawsky-Berger. His job to make sure that IBM customers buy into the shift, too. (VP Bill Zeitler will lead a newly combined storage and server division.)

IBM CEO and chairman Sam Palmisano is "staking his future" on utility computing, says Rich Partridge, VP of enterprise servers for D.H. Brown Associates. "He wants people there who can see the forest and the trees. Irving is the forest person, and Linda is the tree person."

IBM learned that it could be the best judge of what works for customers back in the day, when it was its own biggest mainframe customer, Partridge says. Getting customers to buy into utility computing will be incredibly important for IBM, he says. The company needs to know how to publicize utility computing, and you can't do that until you know where it works and where it doesn't.