SAN CARLOS, CALIF. - Businesses that have application upgrades or tests they want to run but don't want to invest time and money to deploy their development environments now can get the hardware and support from Corio.

As part of its push into so-called on-demand computing, Corio has rolled out Development on Demand, an enterprise application development service that users can purchase on a month-to-month basis. Customers hook into the development environment via a VPN and use it for as long as necessary.

Parker Management Consultants, a systems integrator and Oracle application certified partner in Laurel, Md., used Development on Demand to help a department of the Navy launch Oracle's E-Business Suite of applications. Had Parker Management set up its own development environment, the project would have been delayed at least two months because of the need to procure hardware, says Mark Sweeney, vice president of business development.

"At the start of the project we were looking to hit the ground running, and the Development on Demand offering gave us that opportunity," he says.

Corio guarantees that application development environments - running on Sun and HP boxes in the Unix environment and Compaq boxes in Windows NT - can be up within five days.

"We're able to deliver it very fast and at a dramatically lower cost than what you could do through an upfront capital investment," says John Ottman, executive vice president of worldwide markets for Corio. "Then when your development project is completed you turn it off and it's gone."

Amy Mizoras, an analyst at IDC, says demand is growing among businesses to buy IT services on a pay-as-you-go basis. Corio is smart to take its skills and assets and offer them in this manner, she says.

"If [a customer] is not ready to do full-blown outsourcing of their entire application environment, this is something that can get them used to the idea," she says. "It makes a lot of sense."

While the market for utility computing is in its early stages, according to analysts, many service providers are beginning to provide these types of offerings. IBM announced a big push for its "eBusiness On Demand" services last year; former application service provider Apptix is offering service providers the platform and support they need to sell managed Microsoft Exchange services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

"In today's economy, this has major economic advantages as end customers seek to deploy highly reliable and secure workforce applications while avoiding upfront capital expenditures and the expense associated with IT staff," says Alex Hawkinson, CEO of Apptix. "In the on-demand model, end customers can access sophisticated applications that are highly reliable, for a cost that is predictable and scales with the organization as it grows."