In November we interviewed several key analysts in the Grid space. As a follow-up we posed the following question to our past contributors. "What, in your opinion, was the most influential grid story (or stories) in 2006? Please be specific and give examples." This feature is a summary of their responses.

Looking back, 2006 may not have been as much of a tipping point for Grid as some of us had expected. To be sure, the year brought continued success in the academic and research realm for Grid, and greatly increased adoption across businesses of all kinds. But we also saw a tremendous amount of hype regarding Grid-derived technologies such as SOA and Virtualization, which, at times, threatened to overshadow the ongoing successes of the core Grid technology.

The fact is, Grid is the fundamental technology driving this new wave of enterprise computing, and whatever happens to its much-publicized progeny, Grid is here to stay. Today, virtually every large enterprise is either already running a computational grid, or looking to get one up and running. This represents a nice evolution given that in the past year, Grid merged from niche markets into the mainstream.

There's no going back now, but Grid is definitely moving forward, and popping up in new places. Applications of Grid technology are progressing beyond the first-generation HPC and LOB deployments that were popular among early adopters in the pharmaceutical and financial sectors. Analysts are telling us that enterprises in new fields, from banking to insurance and even human resources, are now adopting the next generation of Grid. What is the next generation? With the marketing wars still raging over the buzzwords of the day, it may be too soon to tell yet, but data and app grids are definitely among those mentioned most.

The era of compute-intensive jobs has, in some ways, proven that Grid is an incredibly powerful technology, but as a platform for applications, it is still up and coming. While highly customized grid-enabled apps are being launched with some frequency, we are still missing the grid-enabled "killer app." And unless the larger IT community has the tenacity to gauge the relative success of grid-enabled apps one solution at a time, it will be up to the grid community to lead the charge up the stack.

The opportunity to deliver the game-changing grid apps remains wide open. If there is one single thing that could drive grid adoption to the next level, it is almost certainly the next generation, mission-critical app, and the opportunity still exists for an ISV to take this space by storm.

Of course, building grid-enabling apps with confidence requires standards setting first. By definition, this is neither easy, nor quickly accomplished. Last month, Carl Claunch of Gartner offered his view. "In the private sector, this was a year of anguish over standardization." While not all in the Grid standards business agree that they've been wringing our hands for the last year, it is true that the Grid community has been struggling mightily to cooperate on standards this year. Two standards-related stories, in particular, bear revisiting now that we've reached the end of 2006: the March announcement on converged standards from the industry giants, and of course, the creation of the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Last spring's announcement from HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft outlining their plan to develop a set of common specifications for resource, event, and management Web-based services, was largely welcomed by the grid community. As Ian Foster explained then, the news validated the goal toward which Globus has been working toward for nearly five years: industry-wide Web-based management standards. Since then, the Globus community has been focused on smoothly migrating these new specs to the Globus Toolkit's (GTv4) Java, C, and Python runtimes.

Several months later, the grid world consolidated further, as the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) and the Global Grid Forum (GGF) completed their merger, forming the Open Grid Forum (OGF). In its early years, the GGF had served the burgeoning community of Grid enthusiasts venerably, but the quick rise of the commercially oriented EGA was a clear signal that the Grid community was growing-and fast. Former GGF chief Mark Linesch, who was tapped to lead the OGF as President and CEO, made clear in interviews that the OGF hopes to bring both groups together under the same roof. The consensus within the Globus community was that the merger was a big step in the right direction. Wider inclusion leads to more robust standards, which are in everyone's favor.

So far, former members of GGF and EGA have been meeting regularly and getting along just fine, as expected. But it hasn't always been so easy: longtime observers know we've ridden some pretty wild hype cycles over the years, from exuberance to disillusionment and back again.

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