"That same set of tools that you have to monitor use to do the rating and billings ... today are the tools you'll want to leverage for the virtualized environment," and the industry is moving in that direction, says Jim Ni, senior technical product manager for virtualization at Microsoft Corp.

The situation could change before long, says Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., pointing to IBM's acquisition of CIMS Lab Inc. last February. "[IBM] cited virtualization as the reason to buy the company," which specializes in resource utilization and allocation of costs based on usage, he says.

But Ware doubts that such tools will show up anytime soon. If the current products are in Phase 1, he says, "I'm sure that it will be Phase 3 or 4 before we can get to that unified accounting functionality."

Norm Fjeldheim, CIO at Qualcomm Inc., says a better solution is to not do chargebacks at all. "That kind of stuff is more trouble than it's worth," he says. "I convinced our management here that it was a bad idea."