According to the Financial Times, the new electronic computing exchange could be operational in three to five months. Any such platform would also be expected to signal the advancement of utility computing, or on-demand computing, which enables corporate customers to rent computer time and run their programs on banks of servers and storage systems owned and operated by the computer companies.
Companies like Sun Microsystems could then attach a nominal rate for every gigabyte of storage used per month and even for an hour’s worth of processing power from each microprocessor.