This IDC study examines the market's move toward a utility, or on-demand, model. Customer adoption has been and will continue to be incremental, methodical, and more evolutionary than revolutionary. IDC believes the short-term market opportunity exists around infrastructure virtualization and change and configuration management solutions that enable organizations to more efficiently manage their environments while at the same time building the foundation for future adoption of a true utility environment. Vendors are advised to monitor market dynamics and customer adoption carefully and to market solutions that solve specific customer issues as a basis for a more complete utility environment.

"Vendors can be confident that for IT managers to push farther up the utility environment stack, they must have solutions available to them whose implementation costs can be justified, not by rose-colored images of a utility computing environment but by the meaningful financial metrics necessary to persuade a diverse range of stakeholders with often differing motivations." ? Michael Rose, associate research analyst, Enterprise Virtualization Software