Adam Gifford: Power computing by plugging into Grid

I got the summons to hear the latest on Grid, Oracle's next-generation technology which is supposed to give companies greater flexibility in the way they store and use their data.

Country manager Robert Gosling walked me through the survey Oracle commissioned from a firm called Quocirca, which talked to 1356 organisations in 19 countries about how they measured up on the Oracle Grid Index.

Grid computing is where you treat all your computing resources as part of one big system, and allocate them on demand.

That is sort of what used to happen with a mainframe computer, but Grid uses software to tie together multiple machines in a virtualised system.

This contrasts with much of what has happened during the past 10 or 15 years, where each application program runs on a dedicated stack of servers and storage. This means expensive machinery spends most of its life sitting around idle.

The payoff for organisations is supposed to be more economic use of their computing resources, particularly during peak demand times such as generating payroll or producing end-of-month or end-of-year accounts.

"Grid is the next paradigm shift and we believe we lead," Gosling said.

The good news, he said, was New Zealand businesses were standardising and consolidating their IT - vital steps towards creating what Oracle means by a grid.

"We believe we can become a leader or early adopter."

Early adopters get the early advantage, so the theory goes. Gosling reckoned early adopters were already enjoying increased efficiency in core applications such as resource planning, customer management and supply chain management.

So who are the local customers doing Grid now? I asked innocently.

"Good question. I knew you'd ask it. Can't give you any yet," said Gosling.

New Zealand Stock Exchange is on the Oracle 10G database, and heading down the Grid path, and Victoria University is an enthusiastic Oracle customer; but like any new generation of technology, this stuff is only easy on the Powerpoint slide.

Sure New Zealand may be well ahead of the US and UK on Quocirca's standardisation index (7.1 out of 10 compared with 5.6) but that may be because our IT shops are way smaller than the warehouses of servers that run the Fortune 1000 corporations.

Grid computing is closely related to service-oriented architecture, which is the idea that instead of building a system that does a series of tasks from A to Z in a set order, you create blobs of code that each do one thing.

By going to a directory of such services, customers can put together their own applications, and the system will find the computing resource to process them.

It is like the electricity in your house. You don't need to know how it is made or how it gets there, you just plug in the kettle and make a cup of tea.

Services may be part of an internal system such as a customer management or accounting package, or they may be a third-party system such as a credit checking agency or a geographic information system.

The essential elements are good directories and platform-independent interfaces, so clients with any operating system using any language, from any location, can consume the service.

While all big vendors have a vision of grid computing and service-oriented architecture, Oracle has probably gone furthest in terms of wrapping a product line around it.

Oracle used to be mainly known for its database management systems, which allow organisations to impose some order on their information.

It also sells packaged applications, which are business processes wrapped up in some kind of logical order, as well as the tools for people to build their own applications.

In recent years it has aggressively moved into middleware, the layers of technology that tie all the bits of a system together. It now wants to sell customers the whole technology stack in a way that gives it as large a portion of the IT budget as it can get.

This is why it is now pushing an architecture that can be built on lots of cheap servers linked together in clusters or grids and running on open-source operating systems.

As can be expected, all the other vendors want their slice of the pie as well.

A big chunk of the world's IT spending still goes to IBM, which has the hardware as well as a complete range of middleware and development tools under the Websphere brand.

Sun has had few takers for its middleware stack, iPlanet, and planet Microsoft will also sell you a complete solution, albeit one many large organisations would not trust with their data or critical business functions.

The biggest pure play middleware company is BEA, which rates second behind IBM and ahead of Oracle in sales of application server platforms - including the application server itself (the bit that applies the necessary business logic to the data), the integration server that translates all the various protocols, and the portal server that handles things such as user authentication, identity management, and content aggregation for websites.

Michael Smith, BEA's Asia-Pacific director of technology, said the shift to service-oriented architecture fitted with BEA's history of creating distributed middleware that worked regardless of the underlying operating systems and tools.

The battleground has shifted from applications to platforms. Organisations have fewer vendors to choose from and need to choose carefully to ensure they have the strength and flexibility to keep up.