HP marked the one-year anniversary of its merger with Compaq by outlining a plan for delivering on-demand computing resources that shrink and grow according to business demands.

The strategy, dubbed Adaptive Enterprise, incorporates HP's hardware, software and services, and integrates them to help customers quickly respond to changing resource needs and thus help their organizations run more efficiently. With the announcement, HP meets Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft and Sun, which recently have laid out plans for so-called utility computing.

Not that HP is late to the utility computing game. In fact, Adaptive Enterprise builds on products Compaq and HP had in place long before their merger last year: Compaq's Adaptive Infrastructure and HP's Utility Data Center.

What Adaptive Enterprise does is expand HP's focus from simply looking at the IT department to creating efficiencies across an entire business, analysts say. Adaptive Enterprise uses a framework for building an IT environment that revolves around business processes. The idea behind Adaptive Enterprise is that IT infrastructure should be broken down into standard components that can be modified on the fly without negatively affecting other system components.

Global transportation company APL has outsourced its messaging infrastructure to HP for about a year, letting it focus on its core business while knowing that its e-mail systems - and the more than 600 ProLiant servers that run them - are in good hands.

It's a typical outsourcing arrangement, but only a first step. APL CIO Cindy Stoddard says the company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Neptune Orient Lines in Singapore, is talking with HP about ways to use the Adaptive Enterprise in its business.

"We're in the process of understanding what some of our business challenges are going to be in 2004 and how we can bring the right technology solutions into play," Stoddard says. The key way that utility computing will fit into APL's architecture is in its ability to expand and shrink infrastructure as necessary, she says.

"That's a real challenge for companies today: You have to invest up to a certain level in order to handle infrastructure needs at a peak, and you don't actually utilize all that capacity all the time," Stoddard says. "We have absolute challenges there."