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Not many massive-scale IT deployments come with a try-before-you-buy option. But IT consultancy BearingPoint and enterprise software firm Cassatt Corp. are shaping up a new practice offering for financial services that allows banks and brokerages to test the impact of a new data center resource reallocation strategy in a lab environment. Both BearingPoint and Cassatt are staffing a New York-based campus opened in May for client institutions' IT teams to explore new computing infrastructures under an IT as a utility computing environment. The Utility Computing Customer Experience Center in New York's 3 World Financial Center gives banks a trial run at how utility computing - which involves decoupling software applications from hardware and operating systems and reassigning them to new servers and resources - can be built for each firm's current business needs and architecture. The center also offers follow-up training should the bank take a stab at deploying UC.