In the last year, IBM has done a credible job sketching its vision of utility computing: scalable, open-source, self-healing resources available to companies on an as-needed basis, often in a hosted environment. Last week, the company added detail to the canvas, disclosing plans to connect the dots between these offerings and strategic business processes.

In his first major address after adding the title of chairman to his CEO tag, IBM's Sam Palmisano said the company is spending up to $10 billion to enhance its on-demand technologies, such as grid computing and storage virtualization, as well as services, in support of an ambitious strategy it's calling "On-Demand Business." That figure includes the $3.5 billion the vendor recently laid out for PricewaterhouseCoopers' consulting practice. IBM says it wants to help companies meet the intense requirements of real-time, collaborative business by redesigning their processes and creating adaptable models based on utility-computing infrastructures.

It's a risk: Few large companies these days are ready to rejigger their client-server infrastructures and throw the switch on what sounds like a shotgun marriage of mainframe computing and the Web. But IBM thinks it can change their minds by using PwC Consulting to help companies respond swiftly to evolving market opportunities and customer needs. "We didn't buy [PwC Consulting] just to get bigger; we bought them because they have the business-process insight and technology that's needed to get to the on-demand phase," Palmisano says.

Observers say a cohesive approach to building a real-time enterprise is essential. "If we don't know where we're going, then going fast doesn't help," University of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad told attendees at InformationWeek's Fall Conference in September.

Enabled by grid-computing standards and Web services, even business processes will become standardized and available on demand, making it easier for customers to make IT decisions based on business value, predicts Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's VP for technology and strategy (see "The Future Utility Of IT," Optimize, November 2002, p. 59). "This is the next phase of E-business; it's the on-demand phase," says Wladawsky-Berger, who will head up a new organization that IBM is creating to consolidate its on-demand computing efforts. The group's task: delivering and integrating a number of capabilities that IBM is just beginning to offer in pieces-such as flexible architectures that automatically adjust to customers' changes in demand for processing power and Linux infrastructures that offer unfailing support for applications. IBM also is launching an on-demand assessment practice.

	IBM is spending $10 billion to support its ambitious On-Demand Business strategy, CEO Palmisano says.

IBM's broad vision resonates with Ford Motor Co., which wants to develop workgroups that are faster, more responsive, more collaborative, and more ad hoc. Collaboration using instant messaging, Web conferencing, and peer-to-peer file sharing has to become the standard way of working at the automaker, says Larry Cannell, Ford's collaborative applications manager-and the right processes have to be in place to make that happen.

But an ad hoc workgroup focusing on a single problem, such as reducing wind drag on the Mustang, can represent anywhere from 10 to 1,000 staffers from various departments, all using multiple applications on different platforms and requiring data from different sources. "In many cases, enlarging a workgroup still means manually adding another server," Cannell says. "That hardly encourages spontaneity." That's why IBM's idea of running the apps Ford needs across an operating system-agnostic grid-one that can move processing power and information to where it's needed, as it's needed-makes sense to Cannell and his colleagues.