IT nirvana--available on demand?

On demand, the agile business, organic IT, real-time enterprise, adaptive infrastructure. These are some of the somewhat descriptive, but ultimately vapid phrases used by vendors and analyst firms to characterize their visions for enterprise computing.

Fundamentally, the various phrases and vision statements are about the marketing of technology solutions, rather than the solutions themselves. It's not much different from the way other products are marketed with catchy phrases or concepts to attract attention and offer a fast-food style of message.

It's not that the ideas encapsulated in the above phrases are entirely bogus or devious. Most of them are well conceived in terms of providing a 30,000-foot view for information technology executives.

Who wouldn't want to be adaptive? You would be embarrassed to say that key parts of your business aren't real-time or that you're not working toward on-demand resource allocation. How could you face your staff if you weren't fully versed in the digital fertilization techniques of organic IT or the nuances of the agile business?

The problem is that when you get down to ground level, the vision becomes cloudy. You lose sight of the forest, and just see a bunch of trees. The grand vision sketched on the whiteboard, with catchy phrases and wholesome goals, doesn't reflect the full spectrum of challenges involved in transforming an enterprise.

Real-time enterprise, for example, can serve as a rallying cry, but it's not a strategy. Nor is there guaranteed agreement on what real-time, agile or organic actually mean in the context of a particular enterprise.

In the case of "on demand," IBM has mutated its own definition of the phrase over time. Initially, on demand was simply an alternative to the traditional modes of delivering IT products and services. It was modeled on utility companies that supply energy or water, for example, on demand. You can easily modify your infrastructure, such as servers, storage, and content distribution, based on resource utilization metrics and pay as you go.

IBM has expanded its use of "on demand" to encompass a broad range of products and services. Searching the IBM site for "on demand" surfaces 17,556 documents. (By contrast, HP renders 1,519 results for "on demand.") Now, IBM has e-business on demand and Web services on demand. WebSphere Portal is an on-demand collaborative e-workplace.

Following is a quote from Jocelyne Attal, vice president of marketing for IBM WebSphere software."In order for customers to build on-demand e-business, they need an IT infrastructure that is open, flexible and secure enough to dynamically change with their needs. Companies can now access any application, processes, data or device across and beyond their business, all within a self-managing, self-calibrating environment that cuts down administrative costs and headaches. IBM is the only company that can deliver software that supports this open, unlimited access to computing resources on-demand, making it possible for customers to make the most of their computing resources and lower the cost of doing business."

Ignoring the IBM sales pitch, deconstructing the quote yields the much expanded definition. IBM decided to throw all of its favorite terms together-open standards, self-managing and calibrating, secure, flexible, dynamic and lower cost-and call it "on demand."

That definition is much closer to how Sun, HP and others pitch their overarching platform vision. Sun is betting its future on its N1 initiative, which takes a more straightforward approach to defining on demand. The company defines N1 as a "heterogeneous architecture that represents the ability to provision compute, storage, and network resources on the fly." The noble goals of N1 are automated change management, reduced complexity, higher resource utilization, and lower TCO.

To characterize its offerings, HP uses the terms on demand services and adaptive infrastructure, as well as access, capacity, printing and applications on demand. But IBM's bending and twisting of on demand has given it a modicum of ownership from a marketing perspective.

Microsoft dubbed its vision "software for the agile business."

"Within every company are the seeds of success. But not every company finds the means to flourish. The critical difference between companies that achieve their potential and those that stumble is the ability to take advantage of opportunity and react to threats. Microsoft .Net-connected software allows you to better connect with customers, partners, and employees. This can reduce costs, raise productivity, and help you gain a significant competitive edge, no matter what business you are in.Net-connected software from Microsoft is a complete set of technologies and tools that deliver the agility your business needs to be successful."

Agile software doesn't sound much different from IBM's or HP's on demand, with the exception that in Microsoft parlance, agility is synonymous with the .Net. You can expect on demand to creep into Microsoft's language at some point to address the growing use and abuse of the phrase.

Gartner, with an army of more the 500 analysts advising vendors and their larger customers, pushes real-time enterprise, and defines it as a corporation that "competes by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays to the management and execution of its critical business processes."Gartner's perspective is more academic--less about specific technologies and more about how to think about the problems enterprises face. The critical issue is having the right information at the right time for optimum process operation or decision effectiveness throughout an enterprise. IBM's "on demand" potpourri could be distilled down to a similar primary goal. The difference is that IBM is compelled to address the problems with its huge array of products and the long arm of IBM Global Services.

Forrester Research gets the award for the most unique phrase--organic IT, which focuses on gaining efficiency and reducing management costs through attacking idle and nascent resources and automating resource sharing. Like the others, Forrester sees Web services as a key enabler for its vision, as well as rapid redeployment services for better sharing of processors and servers, virtualized storage, and the Internet as the primary network.

For the most part, the various ways to describe IT nirvana all have a great deal in common. They are built on simple foundations: save costs, increase productivity, make better decisions, and boost competitiveness. But talk is easy. It's fine to have a vision and call it whatever, but that should not be a substitute for facing reality. Whether you go down the on demand road or follow organic IT or seek agility, make sure you can find your way home.

Leave a message in our TalkBalk forum below, or write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com.