Describing the Elephant: The Different Faces of IT as Service: Terms such as grid, on-demand, and service-oriented architecture are mired in confusion, but there is an overarching trend behind them all.

In a well-known fable, a group of blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each encounters a different part of the animal and, not surprisingly, provides a different description. We see a similar degree of confusion in the IT industry today, as terms such as service-oriented architecture, grid, utility computing, on-demand, adaptive enterprise, data center automation, and virtualization are bandied about. As when listening to the blind men, it can be difficult to know what reality lies behind the words, whether and how the different pieces fit together, and what we should be doing about the animal(s) that are being described. (Of course, in the case of the blind men, we did not also have marketing departments in the mix!)