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We're onto something that people find pretty exciting. This has been going like crazy," said Rob McCormick, the CEO of the US data centre services company Savvis, a few days before the Information Age Future of the Data Centre conference.

McCormick had travelled to the UK early to announce three customer wins and further publicise the vision that - for the time being, at least - sets Savvis apart from rival data centre operators.

That vision involves using virtualisation and rapid provisioning technology wherever possible, along with blade servers to reduce complexity. The result, says McCormick, is higher utilisation (and therefore cheaper use) of processors and storage, and much faster and more flexible deployment of new services.

In setting out the merits of Savvis' approach at the conference, McCormick describes how two familiar generations of computing have failed to keep both IT management and end users happy.

The first generation of mainframe computing, says McCormick, was reliable, inexpensive to maintain and had high levels of utilisation. But while CIOs might have liked this, users had limited access to data or processing power, limited ability to improve processes, and limited ability to customise services to meet requirements.

If anything, the following (and still prevalent) generation of computing was worse. In the client/server era, the proliferation of applications and computers has brought data and applications nearer the user, but at a price: complexity has led to poor reliability; IT departments have lost control of systems and services, and integration across the enterprise is difficult. Research shows that businesses are spending up to 70% of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems, rather than developing new ones.

"I think you can see why this is a train wreck economically," says McCormick. "It's a precise flip of how it used to be on the mainframe." To make matters worse, in most organisations the IT infrastructure is underutilised and unavailable. Windows servers, for example, are only 72% utilised and are down 9.1 hours per month, according to a Savvis survey.

The problem of IT complexity does not end there: rolling out new applications soon leads a complex proliferation of cables, ports, cards, servers, switches and software. This is expensive, time consuming and error-prone.

One answer, of course, is to outsource all or a large part of the IT infrastructure, which can smooth out costs and enable a service provider to manage the data centre on. But there is a limitation with this, too: most services companies simply replicate the complex IT infrastructure of their customers - the so-called "your mess for less" model.

"The traditional outsourcing model is fundamentally broken," says McCormick. "[The outsourcing companies] replicate your entire IT environment and charge you for it. You get 5-10% savings over a long period of time."

Savvis' solution to this is utility computing - a much talked about but so far little used method of virtualising services and breaking the direct link between the applications and the hardware infrastructure on which they run. In this way, new applications can be loaded virtually - with the processing loads and storage demands spread across a bank of devices, rather than one or a few.

In this way, utilisation can be closely and centrally monitored, and shared out across all the participating machines. Savvis uses eGenera blade servers, which effectively reduces the physical complexity, a virtualising (VMWare) software layer and 3Par storage systems to virtualise the underlying the disk infrastructure. The result, claims McCormick, is dramatic; some customers save millions in data centre costs.

"You should not buy from someone who says they can cut your spending by 3%. The real problem is to cut your spending in half, or you are not going to get anywhere. Unless you fundamentally change something, rather than incrementally change it, then you are not going to fix it."

Savvis, argues McCormick, has implemented and realised the benefits of utility computing that many suppliers and experts have been talking about for many years, but which for various reasons have not pursued.