As a shared physical resource, the financial services firm plans to use this capability to create managed services for internal users based on service levels and quality of service instead of the cost of a physical server or processor. The work remains in its early stages, and 'it remains to be seen what's going to work. But our goal is to do that kind of chargeback,' the IT official said.

This is the second customer Azul has announced, although the firm says it has other customers that it can't disclose. For a company introducing a new technology, having customers 'who are willing to talk about the benefits of the technology will be critical to build up any market momentum,' said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Research in Hayward, Calif.

Users tend to enjoy the 'comfort of the crowds' when picking technology, and new systems require a lot of time spent on education, he said.