And Oracle

And finally Oracle, if only because you know there’s no way this writer can go an entire column without mentioning the big boy. Oracle unveiled the fourth Oracle Grid Index, which charts the global adoption of grid computing and investigates related technological issues. Oracle representatives state that the latest research confirms the status of grid computing as a maturing technology and highlighted the rise of service-oriented architectures. According to the study authors, the grid index “is dedicated to mapping the world’s journey to grid computing.”

The Oracle Grid Index for 2005 has risen to 5.4 to 5.2 on the scale of one to ten since November 2005, a two percent increase. Oracle’s adoption lifecycle index rose from 2.9 to 3.2. Study authors ascribe this to So far, grid computing’s currently large presence in areas where the market is familiar. In terms of use, the header "Modest use in some areas" jumped from ten percent to forty percent of organizations surveyed, and seventy percent of organizations have deployed grid computing “in some areas,” astoundingly high up there from its previous rate of 19.5 percent. This reveals a major increase in pilot projects and departmental grids, as opposed to major migration of legacy environments; these new grid computing projects are at the leading edge, and point to a possible significant future rise in grid computing as pilots get rolled out across the rest of the organizations’ IT.

Some facets of service-oriented architecture were examined, and Oracle found that seventy-six per cent of the survey’s IT-sector respondents had heard of SOA, but fifty-five percent of business-sector respondents remained unaware of the concept; twenty-five . A further one-quarter of these respondents had heard of SOA, but had little knowledge of such systems. And business respondents in Europe are even slower to understand SOA. After hearing a definition of the term, fifty-nine percent of European businessmen still did not understand versus thirty percent in America and 29 percent in the Asian Pacific. However, both Germany and “the Nordics” placed in the top three in terms of the grid computing index.