by Ian Foster
DECEMBER 23, 2004

We saw a dramatic increase in the volume of industry discussion and media and analyst attention around commercial-level deployment issues. We heard announcements from major vendors about large enterprise initiatives. And we saw some important discussions start to unfold around practical issues related to grid adoption on the enterprise scale -- issues such as how to best secure a distributed grid environment, as well as software licensing issues.

As we look ahead to 2005, I thought it would be interesting to catch up with some of the leaders from the grid industry and have them weigh in on what they consider to be important issues to watch in the coming year. Responses varied from specific concerns to philosophical perspectives about the implications of grid technology.

Here's what they had to say:....
"In Nemertes' benchmark research 'Extending the Enterprise,' we asked IT executives whether they used grid technologies. Only 8% of participants had deployed some form of grid computing, and they were concentrated in two industries: financial services and pharmaceuticals. The same group of participants reported that 75% had deployed some Web services based on XML and SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol].

"Our analysis suggests that grid computing and Web services in the form of an SOA are feeding each other's growth. Greater adoption of SOAs makes software applications more modular and easier to deploy on a grid infrastructure. Meanwhile, grid computing increases infrastructure utilization and flexibility while lowering operational costs.

"IT executives deploy grid computing to increase business agility and reduce costs and then develop more SOA applications to run on their grid. The greatest obstacle to grid adoption is, therefore, the cost of recoding enterprise applications. In the long run, we believe that the cost savings and flexibility created by adopting grid computing and SOA will far outweigh the costs."

-- Andreas Antonopoulos, principal analyst, Nemertes Research LLC

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