IBM CloudBurst and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance are two different offerings, with different price points. The price for WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is $45,000 for the appliance and 1000 PVU of cloud capacity entitlement (the size of the pool of X86 machines being managed), and additional PVUs are $15 each. For example, a WS CloudBurst Appliance managing a 2000 PVU cloud would cost 45K + 15K = $60K.

"Companies like to keep control of their servers and the applications and data that run on them, so even if they could upload their ERP systems onto the Amazon EC2 or the Google Apps clouds, they probably wouldn't. Maybe someday, but not today"

And yet many companies don't think twice about running their systems at off-site locations such as with IBM, EDS etc. - particularly mainframe stuff where it can be much cheaper.

As with most of these things, what is the norm in the mainframe world will trickle down to the smaller servers eventually.