Star Internet and IBM have launched a new managed service offering, enabling UK-based firms and other businesses to pay for server capacity as they use it, rather than buying the machines out-right, or renting a fixed number of servers from a hosted data centre.

The new service model, On Demand – which Star and IBM claim is unique in the UK and northern Europe – aims to reduce customers' costs by charging them for the server capacity that they actually use, rather than for the calculated peak capacity of the servers that they use, so that the charge mirrors the peaks and troughs in the firm's usage of its infrastructure.

The On Demand service uses IBM's Tivoli software, running in Star's data centre in Gloucester. At the official launch in London, Mark Lamb, technical director of managed services at Star, said: "Under this model, firms of all sizes can be flexible and efficient in responding to e-business needs, maximising performance while minimising costs."