Up to now, the reason software couldn't be metered like electricity is that there was no "kilowatt" equivalent as a universal unit of consumption for software. A kilowatt of electricity is a kilowatt whether it's consumed by an appliance or an electric car. The reason it's universal is that it is application-independent and can be monitored and metered at an infrastructure level. Today, service-oriented programming (SOP) introduces a paradigm shift at an application-platform level that makes it possible to have a metered universal unit of consumption for the software platform. In SOP, all parts of an application are encapsulated as in-memory service modules instead of objects. A service module can be composed of other service modules forming a hierarchical stack of services at runtime. The result is multi-granular software that is componentized strictly as in-memory services at all levels of granularity. Each service module in the hierarchy directly maps to the root service module that represents a business operation. This way metered service invocation becomes a universal unit of software consumption that directly maps to business processes at a platform level. Typically, at runtime a Service Virtual Machine (SVM) automatically handles the metering and distribution of consumed services. Each service module that is consumed at runtime has a nominal platform-related cost that may only include the cost of using the SOP platform or it may include the cost of the entire technology stack from network and hardware all the way to the cost of the SOP platform. Furthermore, a service module can be assigned an application-related cost by the application developer that reflects the business value of the service.

There are three revolutionary aspects (see Figure 1) to the multi-granular universal unit of consumption in SOP's utility model:

1. The SOP utility consumption model enables a robust incentive structure for the realization of a component-based software industry and exchange. The reason there is no significant storehouse of standalone business software parts available out there is that there is no robust incentive structure to encourage people to create them. Today, a business software application is priced and sold as an end product and its inner business components do not have a standalone value. Software that can be metered based on the consumption of its multi-granular parts would result in a revenue collection infrastructure that incentivizes the formation of a supply chain for commoditized business software "parts." These parts will be available to customers both small and large, integrators, and application or other multi-granular component developers. This encourages the formation of component-based software industry and exchange,
2. The SOP software platform, unlike traditional SOA middleware, can be provided on a utility model based on Service Invocations Metered (SIM) as an application independent unit of cost. A kilo SIM to the software platform is like a kilowatt to an electric grid. For example, if running a software application requires one Mega SIM of SOP platform computing power per month, it simply means it requires one million service invocations metered by the SOP platform to operate. In SOP, there is a linear relationship between an automated business operation and the number of service invocations required to componentize and deliver that automation. The SOP platform vendor can charge a nominal fee for each SIM for the productivity, deployment, and reuse value that the platform provides regardless of the particular application. The software or services vendor that provides the intellectual property for the business process automation can determine an application-related fee for the invocation of the services they provide. The IT cost of the application is equal to the cost of the total SIM consumed by the application plus the cost of the application service invocations automatically metered, categorized, and billed through the SVM.
3. A business application and its components that are deployed through SOP can be fully hosted as SaaS, completely installed on-premise, or combined from hosted and on-premise components. A SIM is a SIM regardless of its location or context of use, and a SIM account can aggregate metered invocations from multiple places.

Now, none of this is relevant unless the end enterprise customer decides to adopt this utility model. The end customer will incrementally adopt the utility model over time: with equitable pricing the customer will pay only a fraction of what he or she is used to paying today, without any upfront investment and risk, for what software actually does as opposed to what it is supposed to do. Without ever investing in an enterprise license, the end customer benefits from company-wide access to the same platform toolset and runtime usage efficiencies due to global sharing. One of the biggest implications of the SOP utility model for the customer is in the incremental alignment of business requirements and IT operations. By directly relating the cost of metered software consumption to the value of the business operation supported by that software, the IT cost can be directly tied to the operating profits, resulting in a natural alignment of business and IT.

Another significant benefit to end customers is that through metered IT they can more effectively apply process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma to their business processes. Since the automated business operations and their sub-processes are metered at a molecular level, it is much easier to measure the cycle times and defects within and across business processes. Furthermore, in a usage-based IT model of the enterprise, process automation improvements can be performed incrementally and without the barriers of upfront platform licensing costs that result in big-bang, cliff-based approaches to development.

The SOP utility model for a software platform provides a key enabler in the formation of a "SaaS Superhighway" through the convergence of the telecommunication and business software industries. Telecom vendors are already providing managed services hosted on their global data centers. They can extend those services to include the delivery of a metered SOP software platform much like the way the electric grid services are delivered to your door. They can do so at a global level with unprecedented scale. Telecom vendors can significantly increase their revenue and operating margins by delivering the SOP platform as a managed service to software vendors, system integrators, and IT departments (SOA World Magazine). And, while the titans of the business application and middleware industry have a lot of upfront revenue to lose to this utility model, the trillion-dollar telecom industry with its immense reach has billions and billions to gain from delivering the SaaS Superhighway.