IBM’s Ken King says in an interview:
There were developments in at least five areas that drove the Internet 10 years ago and Linux five years ago. We are seeing the same patterns, now, emerging with grid computing.
No. 1: ISV adoption. Ten years ago, you saw ISVs begin to aggressively develop Web-enabled applications. Five years ago, ISVs began delivering applications on top of Linux. We are now seeing the same type of pattern with grid. We had 30 ISVs grid-enable their applications last year, and we’re going after another 50 this year.
No. 2: maturation of the open source community within grid. You saw the Univa announcement. You saw the Consortium announcement. You’re starting to see things put into place for grid that weren’t there a year ago — things that you saw 10 years ago with the Internet and five years ago with Linux. The more the open source community matures within grid, the more it can be leveraged to drive standards. Once you achieve that, grid will take off.
No. 3: standards. You’re starting to see convergence with Web services standards. The more that happens the more you see grid adoption by ISVs and acceptance by customers.
No. 4: the movement of customer adoption from universities and science implementations to commercial customers. Right now, it involves implementations specific to a single customer line of business, but the overall movement into the commercial enterprise is accelerating, and we will see more commercial customers implementing grid across their enterprises over the next two to three years.
No. 5: technology. We’re starting to see maturation of the technology in such areas as data virtualization, provisioning capabilities, and scheduling capabilities. We will also be seeing some significant advances in license management, metering and billing, which are key technologies for implementing grid solutions across the enterprise — which we like to call “enterprise optimization.” Are we there yet? No, but it is coming quickly. The patterns are accelerating, much as they did with the Internet and Linux.
