Nifty. But BEA's Roth who "held several key marketing positions when he worked for Sun Microsystems and was also instrumental in the launch and community building for OpenOffice.org," according to BEA's Dev2dev website, isn't as bullish. "The only thing 'utility' about 'Sun's Grid Compute Utility' is the billing practices," declared Roth. "Only certain kinds of computer programs can be written to take advantage of grid, so Sun's efforts in this regard are of limited usefulness."

That said, curious users can examine Sun's pitch for themselves. "The FAQ at www.network.com details bandwidth etc," said MacRunnels. The Sun-operated site contains a wealth of details on the nascent proletariat-grid strategy.

"Many of the requirements are dedicated by the type and size of jobs and not by the Sun Grid," she added. "We have not had overload problems, but have had a few large enterprise customers wait for a couple of weeks to get on-due to the size of their jobs."

S'pore govt bonds with HP

HP's term "adaptive enterprise" relates to their concept of shared computing power. "Since it's not a definite product, it can be very fuzzy to define specifically how adaptive an enterprise is," Olivier Helleboid, vice president, Adaptive Infrastructure, Technology Solutions Group, HP. "By providing various technologies, like IT consolidation, power reservation, infrastructure management, we aim to enhance enterprises' infrastructure with a high level of flexibility and agility to cope with market changes."