BOSTON - Grid computing is catching on among enterprise IT managers, whose stories prove you don't have to be a rocket scientist to take advantage of the emerging technology.

In fact, the prevailing message of the third annual GlobusWorld 2005 conference last week in Boston, which attracted some 400 attendees and 40 vendor sponsors, seemed to be that grid is ready for the enterprise.

A handful of recent developments help support that: In April the Globus Alliance will deliver Version 4 of its popular open source Globus Toolkit - a collection of tools to grid-enable computing environments - with many Web service enhancements; a Red Hat-like company called Univa has been formed to commercialize the tool kit; and big-hitters HP, IBM, Intel and Sun joined forces late last month to create the Globus Consortium to push grid forward.

The timing is right. According to Forrester Research, 37% of 150 firms surveyed started to roll out some form of grid technology, and another 30% are considering implementations.

"There still isn't a broad consensus of what grid really is, but the use cases are beginning to move out of the niche, scientific application area and into more mainstream uses, such as distributing the workload of an accounts receivable application," says Andreas Antonopoulos, principal analyst at Nemertes Research. "You can't get any more mainstream than that."

Grids promise to tap under-utilized compute, storage and network resources and distribute processing workloads based on application or end-user demand. In some cases, grids require users to rewrite applications so they can run across multiple servers, while in other scenarios grid software can act as middleware and parse out processing chores to available resources.

"Grid computing can represent revenue opportunities and pose a clear return on investment for many companies," says Jonathan Eunice, president of research firm Illuminata. "For others, it's about simplifying and unifying systems and building a common services bus or service-oriented architecture."

Ellen Kraus, senior director of enterprise architecture for Bowne & Co., a financial printing company in New York, told attendees that she looked to grid computing to try to get more than 15% utilization from her 200 servers.

The low utilization stemmed from the fact that the company's resources were dedicated to particular applications, and each silo was engineered for peak demand. "Our business is very seasonal, the spikes and valleys are huge, but we built an infrastructure to support the spikes" and have to maintain that year-round, she says. "We would rather build for the average utilization and then share processing power" to meet peak demands.

To get a six-week pilot off the ground, Kraus worked with IBM Global Services and implemented grid cluster software from DataSynapse that sits on top of the servers and distributes application-processing loads.

Bowne used in-house developers to grid-enable one homegrown application used to format client data for retirement reports. The application is just one of many Bowne runs on more than 1 million client records at scheduled times throughout the year.

"We are a long way off from an end-to-end grid implementation," she says. "We just took a section of the process that we thought best fit grid." While she can foresee cost savings, the fact that grid unlocks resources and makes it possible for the company to add new customers without having to install new servers is just as important. "The business doesn't want to wait 21 days to sign a new client up," she says.

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