In his report Staten quotes Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, who says that the very best at datacenter management holds the solution to the problem of IT shops being unable to respond on time to dynamic business needs.

Leading Web services companies have built their businesses around innovative approaches to IT infrastructure that maximize datacenter efficiency -- investments that have given them a distinct advantage over competitors that came to Web services from a traditional IT foundation, says Staten. This led Vogels to conclude that if managing a massive data center isn't a core competency of your business, then maybe you should pass the responsibility to someone who has:

One: vastly superior economics. The leading providers of Internet apps and services -- whether their own or as a hosting provider -- buy so much datacenter equipment that they have an enormous amount of negotiating power.

Two: better practices for handling dynamic workloads. The leading Internet services companies have invested not only in better processes, but have also built management and administration tools that let them spread applications across thousands of servers and scale them quickly. They have optimized their infrastructures to accommodate new services quickly and without disruption, letting them introduce new capabilities every week.

Three: expertise in dynamic capacity management. For these companies, the productivity of their assets is paramount, as the cost of their services is directly proportional to the ongoing costs of the datacenter. The more productivity they can wring from each square foot, the higher their profitability. Thus, they closely monitor the infrastructure consumption of each app.

Four: consumption-based cost tracking. It is the tight mapping of IT consumption by application that determines the margins on the services they provide. For most of these companies, this reporting is internal, but for an innovative few, this tracking is starting to be exposed as a new kind of offering.

Three streams of evolution are occurring in the enterprise IT space at almost the same time. The first is in supercomputing, which according to Staten, is moving from extremely large, single systems to clusters of inexpensive systems, and is being redefined as high performance computing (HPC). It is now entirely x86-based systems in large quantities grouped together with parallel computing technologies.

This is where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are heading to as well. As some ISP services are being increasingly commoditized, ISPs are finding it hard to improve margins. So, they are chasing higher levels of enterprise functions. ISPs are moving in two probable directions: software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and managed services provider (MSP).

However, there's a twist. "Being a SaaS provider requires ISPs to have expertise in delivery of apps over the Internet as a pay-per-use service. Most ISPs don't have that. That's why there are a greater number of software companies emerging as SaaS providers, compared to ISPs. ISPs are evolving more as MSPs," points out Staten.

The third evolution is around the data center itself. As Vogels substantiated, managing massive data centers in-house is increasingly becoming unwieldy. The result: more enterprises are looking to outsource a majority of their datacenter functions.

All the three streams seem to be converging. HPC is gaining ground, ISPs are up-scaling their service models and leveraging HPCs to offer value-added services and finally enterprises are increasingly looking to outsource their more commoditized IT functions. Overlap the three and you get a new market opportunity: cloud computing.

"Due to their singular focus on maximizing the efficiency of their Internet services hosting practices, a select few Web services and hosting companies have realized they can deliver the benefits of their unique infrastructure practices to their customers as a new type of hosting service. Enter cloud computing," says Staten.