David Longworth wrote an excellent piece, Grid Lock-in On Route To SOA, declaring that “vendor strategies to promote grid computing as the IT backbone for service oriented architectures are missing a vital element: standards.” Among his findings:

Immature and incomplete standards for sharing grid computing resources could leave enterprises locked into vendors’ proprietary technology stacks:

  • IBM, CA, HP, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle each have grid strategies
  • All aim to dynamically offer IT capacity to meet business needs
  • But vendors’ proprietary grid environments aren’t interoperable
  • Standards for resource sharing and management are emerging
  • For now, implementing grid means accepting vendor lock-in

Concludes Longworth: “Research group IDC has estimated that the market for grid computing will grow to $12 billion across both technical markets and commercial enterprise… But until standards like WSRF and DCML gain substance and momentum, the reality today is that the majority of commercial grid initiatives will be tied to individual vendors’ proprietary grid environments, without the ability to share or manage resources across separate grid architectures.”