Segmentation of the Grid Computing Market... on the provider side
The overall Grid market comprises several specific markets.
Grid middleware is a specific software product, which enables the sharing of heterogeneous resources, and virtual organizations.
Major Grid middlewares are Globus Toolkit, gLite, and UNICORE. (OMII 2007).
Utility computing is referred to as the provision of Grid computing and applications as service.
Major players in the utility computing market are Sun Microsystems, IBM, and HP. (BEinGRID D2.1.1).
Grid-enabled applications are specific software applications that can utilize Grid infrastructure.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is „software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers.” (Garter 2007a).
Segmentation of the Grid Computing Market... on the user side
The four segments above are split, on the user side, in internal and external deployment
IT deployment strategy
Traditionally, companies deploy IT resources internally. This gives them full control over their IT. However, internal deployment of IT has potential downsides. For example, infrastructure resources are underutilized.
Obtaining IT capabilities as a service (SaaS) from external providers may be considered as an attractive alternative to inhouse arrangements, for larger enterprises as well as for SMEs.
IT spending and investments
IT spending can fall into either of the two broad categories of infrastructure or software applications. As shown in the figure above, spending in the markets for Grid middleware and utility computing is infrastructure budget, whereas spending in the markets for Grid-enabled applications and SaaS is software application budget.
"we saw Grid computing become firmly established as a means to support service-oriented architecture (SOA) application infrastructure"
William Fellows from The 451 Group, 2005
“ In two to five years, SOA will reach mainstream adoption and will deliver transformational changes in the role and capabilities of IT ”
Gartner (2008g)
“ The main benefits of Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) are increased utilisation of individual resources and increased service levels as applications do not depend on the availability of any individual resource, but may use any one resource available in a pool."
Capgemini
The following pages will provide the analysis of these segments of the Grid computing market starting with the Grid middleware market.
