IT is moving from being a point of differentiation for an organisation towards becoming a point of constraint.  Old-style approaches to computing, looking at particular applications for specific areas, one application per server and platforms engineered for peak usage are beginning to look too costly and inflexible to meet today’s business needs.  The home of IT  – the data centre  – has too many discrete masters, through facilities management, IT and even the business itself.  The cost of change – and the impact of change on the business – is often cited as the reason why so many organisations still struggle on with existing platforms and architectures.  A new approach is needed – one where future states can be rapidly modelled to identify what impact there will be on the business directly, on the cost of the new platform and where workloads should be placed in order to best meet the needs of the business.