- The interest for utility computing, i.e. SaaS offerings is increasing (The 451 Group 2007). This trend has been in particular enforced by well established Internet companies as for example WebEx, Amazon, AOL, who offer their services in form of utility computing. However, there is still confusion regarding the licensing models and how applications are priced in virtualised environments. The established providers of utility computing are extending their services. For example, IBM has recently unveiled his fourth Deep Computing Capacity on Demand facility in London to better serve investment banks, in addition to its centres in New York, France and Minnesota (The 451 Group 2007). Another player driving utility computing are telcos. For instance T-Systems in Germany is rolling out an SAP on-demand service.
- There is a growing interest by ISVs for Grid computing (The 451 Group 2007). This is mostly evident in vertical markets with strong Grid interest or for applications that are suitable for Grid (for example business intelligence and data mining). First steps towards Grid friendly licensing models can be observed at some vendors.
- Service-oriented computing is evolving from awareness into implementation. The market research company Gartner expects that by 2008 SOA will provide the basis for 80% of development projects (Gartner 2005). Forrester furthermore reports that SOA "
is a key way in which many organisations are beginning to plan, implement, and deliver IT to meet the evolving need of business" (Forrester 2006). First examples of successful deployment of SOA have been published.
- Open source software is considered to have higher adoption rate and acceptance
- The main focus of adoption at companies was at creating shared internal/enterprise utilities and the use of Grid as a platform for shared services. First developments towards financial models to charge for shared infrastructure can be observed (The 451 Group 2007). In general there is a trend towards using Grids not only for high performance computing (HPC), but also for more mainstream application. Leading in this are investment banks.
- Companies that have adopted Grid technology in a first mover manner and have made first experiences, shift from seeing Grid as way to save costs towards Grids as a mean to "make money". It is expected the both trends will increase in the next 12 months (The 451 Group 2007). Applying Grid technology to "make money" basically means to see major benefits in being able to better respond to changing conditions, shorter time to market, and establishing of new business models.
- Grid middleware vendors are disassociating from the term "Grid", which is considered as commoditised and confusing (The 451 Group 2007), (see also the discussion in D2.1.1). They furthermore strive to broaden their perspectives and product lines. Some vendors started to use the term Grid 2.0 in analogy to the term Web 2.0 in order to denote the evolution towards a matured service-oriented technology (The 451 Group 2007).
This Material was produced by the BEinGRID project.
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