"Now [those skeptics] are our strongest advocates," adds Horvath.

It won’t always be so easy to convert the masses, however. "In these worlds inside an organization, you have very siloed resources," says Ian Baird, chief business architect and vice president of marketing at grid software maker Platform Computing. "They’re server huggers. They don’t want to let go of their resources," fearing that sharing will result in loss of control and reductions in departmental budgets as servers disappear and computing resource management becomes centralized. Often, people confronted by grid worry that their status will suffer or that their data’s security, swimming around in the grid, will be compromised.

Baird says CIOs need to communicate to managers and users that with grid management, software jobs can be prioritized to make sure everyone gets their fair share of resources. Grid security systems can ensure that data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, even when the data runs on a variety of dispersed PCs. And users won’t suddenly find their PCs locked up because somebody in engineering needs a bit more computing horsepower.

"The politics of grid are a real issue," says Wachovia’s Cates. "I believe that’s primarily because individual business units lose the ability to control specific hardware." But, he adds, "as the grid approach is proven and use expands, we’re hoping the advantages will make that as much of a nonissue as possible."

Standards, Pricing and Other Grid Hurdles

Creating tools that work in distributed, heterogeneous environments is a field ripe for standards, something both grid vendors and customers realize. "Obviously," says SociŽtŽ GŽnŽrale’s Benoist, "if you want to change your applications and move them, you feel better in an open standard world," where applications can work with a variety of grid management software instead of being tied to a single vendor.

Understanding that concern, vendors and researchers are involved in several standards bodies. Key among those are the Global Grid Forum (GGF), the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) and the Globus Alliance. The GGF?whose members include Ascential, DataSynapse, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Platform Computing and Sun?works to develop standards intended to create a wide range of interoperable grid-computing environments and applications. The EGA?formally announced in April by Oracle, HP, Sun and others (though notably not Microsoft, IBM or Platform Computing)?has set goals of providing standards aimed at grid-enabled enterprise applications?what it claims will be a subset of the GGF’s work. Globus was formed by a group of research organizations, including Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. The group implements standards through its Globus Toolkit, an open-source development suite that lets software makers jump-start their grid development. Current standards include the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) and?most recently?the Web Services Resource Framework, which will supplant OGSI later this year, according to GGF, and allow grid software makers to use common Web services standards to identify and utilize grid-computing resources.