'In a normal distributed server environment, the utilization rate normally ranges between 5 percent to 20 percent while in a mainframe it can be as much as 90 percent when you consolidate various applications,' Bliss said in an interview.

According to IBM's own data, 60 percent of revenues generated by companies are driven by new applications such as ERP, Java and others that run on a service oriented architecture (SOA).

Running an SOA environment allows a user to merge existing applications with new applications and run these in a distributed environment that can also be accessed over the Internet.