A Broader Scope Needed for Grid Standards Bodies

There is a great article in a recent GRIDtoday from Ian Lumb detailing the Open Grid Forum's necessity but questioning its sufficiency. At a high level, Ian's point is that standards are all fine and well and indeed necessary, but the real crux of the problem is being able to show genuine mass-market adoption of Grid technology.

Ian draws an excellent contrasting picture of the relative success of virtualization and web services and its message of in-sourced virtualization compared to outsourcing utilization and "plugging into the Grid" as the key messages of Grid.

In this blog I recently wrote on the Grid community needing to escalate application development. Ian points out that "applications can be effectively Grid-enabled by drawing on non-GGF, non-EGA or even Web services standards." The real danger here is that the first one to demonstrate the mass-market appeal for Grid, instead of simply another infrastructure based upon its principles, will take the trophy and the rest will fade into obscurity. Fine for the OGF if this happens to be a group that embraces the standards that have been the raison d'etre of the GGF for the better part of the last decade. But will it?

Ian states "Grid computing isn't quite as big a deal as many would like it to be." Why? There is still today a lack of the enterprise proof points and third party validation that is needed to show that there is substance to the promise of grid computing. Organizations like OGF will help, but there needs to be and increased concentration on organizational support, enterprise case studies and direct application of the technology to name a few.