"As things get more and more automated and more and more real time, it will be IT in this business that differentiates," Bishop said.

Jamie Bernardin, chief technology officer at DataSynapse, said that to improve transaction speeds, the transaction application running on it can grow and contract as needed. Through a Web interface, a user could configure his application servers in a central location.

Donna Scott, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that unlike with grid computing, many organizations have seen Web-based applications grow significantly, but they tend to operate in silos. "Most organizations have these islands of computing and they don't talk to each other," she said.

IBM also has a product, WebSphere-XD, that allows transactions across a shared resource pool, but these technologies are still new, Scott said.