Grid's place in the service-oriented architecture

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November 29, 2004 (Computerworld) -- Enterprise IT professionals are hearing quite a bit these days about the arrival of service-oriented architectures (SOA) as the preferred direction of application architecture and development.
The common elevator pitch is that SOAs are transforming monolithic applications into services, thus allowing portability, reusability and on-demand access. Instead of thinking about applications residing on a specific server, we should now think of ubiquitous services that can be used and shared more dynamically. The implied benefits are simplified design, code reuse and a giant step toward "business agility."
Further fueling enthusiasm for SOAs are some compelling statistics that suggest widespread industry buy-in and planning. Perhaps the most commonly cited SOA statistic is Gartner Inc.'s prediction that by 2008, 60% of enterprises will use SOA as their "guiding principle" when creating applications and processes. The Radicati Group Inc. expects the SOA market to reach $6.2 billion by 2008. The Yankee Group found that 75% of the 437 enterprises it surveyed in the U.S. are already planning large SOA investments.
To read the news, SOA isn't just the next big thing -- it's right around the corner.
But the essential consideration that somehow seems to be getting lost in the shuffle is that while SOAs may be the conceptual framework for increased agility on the application layer, the actual execution of modularized services requires a much better command of enterprise resources than the typical organization has today. SOA can use common Web services protocols (XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) to distribute processes, but it in and of itself doesn't describe the distribution and management of the resources.
This is where the grid computing and SOA movements converge.
Grid enables an effective collection of distributed resources. Grid defines the virtualization of data and resources as well as mechanisms for resiliency, including monitoring, resource and data discovery, and security.
In order to execute a computing function, you need a process and a resource. Until the enterprise gets better command of its resources, the promised land of "services when and where you need them" will remain just an idea of where applications are heading.

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