Business Applicability

Within business communities, the Grid concept is far more popular among large corporations. Baum, the publishing editor for Oracle Corporation, states that these corporations are initially attracted by the amount of savings that the technology can provide. Mainstay Partners conducted an ROI study to evaluate the enterprise grid technology platforms currently in use at seven participating companies. It was concluded that the adaptation of grid technology yielded an average of 43 percent savings in hardware cost. Much of the savings were credited to the shift from a large symmetric multiprocessor server to a number of lower cost servers. With the use of Grid technology the latter setup delivered similar or at times even more computational power than the larger system, however with fewer costs. Baum's report adds that the grids within these companies were being used for a variety of applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), decision support, customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM).

Still, companies that operate in the financial services industry, drug discoveries and weather modeling are initially more prone to benefit from Grid technologies, as they are involved in complex scientific and mathematical calculations and therefore require an added amount of computational power. So are companies that tend to process large amounts of data for their business intelligence activities. However, organisations are increasingly being enticed to adopt Grid technologies even for their transactional based systems, given that Grids may further facilitate storage space Issues.

Challenges faced by Grid Computing

IDC, the market intelligence and advisory services firm, are referring to Grid computing as the fifth generation of computing, after client-server and multi-tier (Table 1).

Yet, according to IDC, the technology still needs to be 'normalised' and has to overcome various challenges. IDC believes that these concerns, in some cases, are more perception than reality, and as organisations gain more experience with this distributed approach, their concerns will be laid to rest.

Additionally, a research conducted by the 451 Group shows that software licensing, security and bandwidth matters are among the things that can disturb grid rollouts.

Conclusion

Whilst Grid computing still needs to find broad acceptance in the commercial space, yet, market analysts state that the technology is here to stay. As Tom Hawk, the general manager of Grid computing for IBM says, "The Web is about sharing information. The grid is about sharing resources".