One of the long term objectives of all the big IT systems vendors is to find the next `big thing’. Selling servers that are now off-the-shelf commodity items, even with infrastructure management software, is now a recipe for disastrously decreasing margins. That next big thing is likely to be the big `S’ word – services. This is why IBM’s recent Blue Cloud announcement is more interesting for the future it presages than what it offers now.

IBM’s laboratories are most certainly not alone in developing technologies that allow users to request packages of services in the form of applications and tools together with the systems resources needed to run them. HP, for one, has been demonstrating just such a capability at its research labs for more than two years. The company may well be kicking itself for not announcing something already – and conspiracy theorists might even be tempted to ponder any possible connection between HP’s Software Universe event next week (a regular focus for new announcements) and IBM’s announcement last week.

Be that as it may, IBM’s Blue Cloud looks at first sight an interesting attempt at providing users with new tools that offer users a far greater operational flexibility. This is where users can start to request packages of applications and resources that can be provisioned dynamically, either when requested (if sufficient resources are available of course) or at a pre-determined time, for a pre-determined time period. Such packages would, of course, come to be seen by users as `services’ called up when required. This would mean that one of the underlying concepts of SOA – getting users to stop thinking in terms of `running applications’ (with all that that entails) – would at last start to become reality.

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Blue Cloud, as it currently exists as a BladeCenter chassis of Linux-based Blades, is little more than a prototyping tool. But the question for CIOs and IT managers is then – a prototype of what?

It would be easy to suggest that the `production’ system would be a whole datacentre of BladeCenter chassis’ providing a gloriously flexible SOA infrastructure just for one company – an `intra-structure’. But, even with the developments in IBM’s autonomic computing environment announced a couple of weeks ago – where the systems can be expected to care for themselves even more comprehensively – having to provide maintenance and support to such hugely complex datacentres scattered all over the globe would be, to put an unfine point on it, an economic pain in the butt.

However, if those datacentres were fewer, and bigger, and IBM-owned the economics of it all could look a lot brighter, and they would be moving in on the `inter-structure’. In addition, the company would be selling systems to itself to provide a service to end users rather than to end users themselves, or other service providers. This would be an obvious opportunity for the accountancy profession to wax creatively in the area of operating margins.

Let’s face it, when compared to the network `Cloud’, Blue Cloud is a mere wisp of steam from a dying cup of coffee. But for IBM, HP and one or two others, moving towards owning a large tranche of the network Cloud that is not already owned by Google - and providing the services that users will need - is an obvious and important goal.

Getting users experienced in the new ways of working in and through the Cloud – and in particular away from the current psychological barriers to SOA that present themselves in the concepts of `my data’ and `my applications’ – is arguably the most important prototype work that could now be undertaken. Once beyond that, users can start to stop caring about `systems’. Who cares what `system’, `application’ or `operating system’ is being used, for the cloud is the cloud is the cloud.