Quocirca's Grid Index

I see Quocirca (and Oracle - they commissioned the article) have updated their Grid Index which shows "how initial pilots of Grid computing are now moving towards full implementations".

According to the article, enterprise-wide grids are still rare and tend to favour more discrete cluster grids - in FS this is kind of consistent with business-aligned implementations of vendors such as Datasynapse and Platform. I also thought it was interesting that the US leads in adoption rates (we see the opposite effect in Financial Services where London is ahead of New York, for example).

There is mention of a tight correlation between localized SOA implementations and the use of grids, while broad-scale SOA adoption and grids are much looser correlated. This is not very surpising, as I have not seen many broad-scale SOAs in the first place, and even business-aligned SOAs in finance seem to have had limited success (as a real service-orientated architecture versus component-based architectures which is what most companies end up doing). At least the article's conclusion about there being a low level of knowledge around SOAs confirms this. Not so sure that the reason is that companies do not want to combine too many new technbologies into one larger project, or if it is because businesses tend to be more stove-piped in general.

One thing I did not see referenced is the implementation of data grids, and distributed memory solutions in general which are definitely enjoying some growth in FS. Would also like to see a similiar study done that included virtualization and how it is actually being used.