"Microsoft announced that in about two years they're going to ship a hypervisor, and VMware Infrastructure is so far beyond a hypervisor," she said. "A hypervisor is the single-node thing that goes on a single server."

"Before virtualization, if you had an application, and you wanted to provision it, you had to go figure out where the server was, where the storage was and very carefully do a capacity estimate, a peak-load estimate, and configure it very statically for that server and then get it up and running, and that server had to have exactly the right operating system and be configured to that operating system," continued Greene.

Back to terms

We're still a long way from the model of utility computing that matches AC electricity's common standards and ease-of-use. But tech history is filled with good ideas that started as concepts, got underway, and are now de facto standards-the GUI (graphical user interface) springs to mind. When will UC become as standard as AC? Time will tell, but time it will take.

-- IDG staff contributed to this story