Special Features:

WILL FINANCIAL SERVICES DRIVE GRID ADOPTION?
By Derrick Harris, Editor

"Grid typically means as many things as there are people in the room," said Peter Ffoulkes, Sun's group manager of HPTC marketing.

Sun, he said, uses a fairly broad definition of Grid computing. The company looks at Grid computing as the pooling of resources, and the efficient utilization of those resources. Grid, Ffoulkes said, is the "natural evolution" of Sun's "The network is the computer" motto.

Based on this definition, it should come as no surprise that Ffoulkes described the financial services sector as the industry most likely to drive widespread enterprise Grid adoption.

The reason being, he said, is that financial services is a unique market. Due to the extreme competitiveness within the industry, companies have come to realize that any small edge is of the utmost importance. As a result, many in the financial services industry have been using Grid technology for some time in order to reap its benefits in terms of ROI.

That competitiveness also leads to a company's in-house code for various applications being, in most cases, one-of-a-kind and highly guarded, Ffoulkes said. This practice makes financial services the perfect market for early adoption because companies do not have to wait for ISVs to introduce Grid-enabled applications; the companies create their own Grid applications.

A more recent reason that financial services companies have been utilizing Grid technologies has to do with the string of regulations that have come into play recently, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basle II, a risk management regulation directed at the financial industry.

Equity and Derivatives BNP Paribas, a French bank that recently chose Sun to upgrade its current Grid infrastructure (see story in this issue), thought the Basle II regulations made the upgrade necessary. Simply put, Ffoulkes said, the bank needed to perform more computations within the same time frame. Since it couldn't create time, it had to up its computing power.

Having prior experience in deploying Grids means financial services companies will have a smoother transition when expanding upon their current Grid setups.

As companies in the financial services industry continue to experience successes as a result of their Grid deployments, other industries will follow, he said.

Other companies follow banks, Ffoulkes said, because they realize that the banking industry is very commercial. The consensus is that if banks and other financial services companies are using Grid computing, it must work. And, he said, as ISVs begin to develop more enterprise-class applications for Grid, more industries will begin to make the transition to Grid infrastructures.

If Sun and its fellow members of the Enterprise Grid Alliance have their way, this will all begin to happen sooner rather than later. The EGA recognizes the need for standard interfaces that allow all applications to interoperate within a Grid infrastructure, Ffoulkes said, and aside from doing its own work, the EGA is trying to make sure other standards bodies keep this, and other commercial concerns, in mind.

In addition, the EGA recently announced steering committees in both the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions to ensure the word gets out. However, Ffoulkes said, there is very strong interest in enterprise Grid throughout the world, and corporate culture is just as big a factor in adoption as is geographical location.

In the financial services industry, the culture is very conducive to Grid adoption. To make a long story short, companies within the industry have the need, the expertise, and the control of their own codes necessary to make Grid a legitimate benefit now.