Grid standards will undoubtedly help in the effort to move more software to grid by providing a common framework on which applications can be built. And large software companies such as Oracle and SAP already either have products (Oracle 10g) or pilot programs (as SAP does) for grid-enabled applications in place. "Grid has kind of been like a science experiment until now," says Tony Scott, CTO at General Motors. "It’s been not commercialized, not standardized, not accessible, not really supported in the classical IT environment." But Scott sees the entrance of Oracle and others as a sign that grid will begin to develop the support infrastructure required by enterprise IT tools: "We not only need the product itself, we need the manageability tools, we need the provisioning tools, we need all of the ecosystem it takes to support these things in our environment."

It’s a Grid, Grid, Grid, GRID World

Grid computing continues to evolve. Analysts and vendors now identify at least three types of grids. While most people think of computational grids, enterprises are looking into data grids that don’t share computing power but instead provide a standardized way to swap data internally and externally for data mining and decision support (music sharing systems like LimeWire and Kazaa are examples). Collaborative grids, meanwhile, let dispersed users share and work together on extremely large data sets. (The NEESgrid, www.neesgrid.org, for example, allows earthquake researchers to share data and even research equipment as virtual teams over the Internet.) Clabby of Clabby Analytics also notes that subgenres such as utility grids, enterprise optimization grids and others continue to develop. In short, grid isn’t going away.

Given that, it behooves CIOs to identify those business functions and applications that might benefit from being grid-enabled. As GE Financial Assurance’s Horvath says, "I think it would be very difficult for a CIO to find a technology and an application that has the payback that [grid] does. The cost is so low and the benefits are so high that it can’t be ignored."