Present day enterprise computing may involve thousands of interconnected computers. Users benefiting from the operation of these machines may not even be aware of the vast scale of this infrastructure; the system just "works". This is computing in the large, the enterprise IT equivalent of the cosmological superclusters.

These enterprise computing superclusters exhibit certain patterns and behaviors that can be understood through the integration of three very well established technologies, virtualization, service orientation and grid computing. We call the collective representation of these superclusters "virtual service oriented grids" or VSGs for short.

If you take this trio of technologies one at a time, they're old news. Research on virtualization goes back to the early 1960s and the same holds true for SOA if we go back to its roots in object oriented programming. Grids were started in the late 80s, but if we take their high performance computing context, they go back to the dawn of electronic computing in the early 1940s.

Together these three powerful technologies define a new information technology model that will fundamentally change the way we do business. It is not because we'll be able to bring up wonderful new applications to market. That's only the beginning. These technologies allow the development of applications in a federated fashion using service modules that we call "servicelets". The difference is that these federated or composite applications can be built orders of magnitude faster than traditional, single-vendor applications. This new environment will open opportunities for thousands of smaller players worldwide.