Grid Computing Matures And Readies Itself For The Mainstream
The fundamental research conducted is dedicated to mapping the world's journey to Grid Computing. At a global level, measured on a scale of 0 to 10, the Oracle Grid Index has risen to 5.4 from its previous value, in November 2005, of 5.2. All of the underlying indices making up the overall Grid Index - Foundation Readiness, Knowledge & Interest and Adoption Lifecycle - show steady increases in virtually all geographies. Analysis of the Grid Index numbers over its previous three cycles reveals a pattern of a maturing technology in the process of crossing the chasm between early adopters and mainstream use.

So far, Grid Computing has been embraced by the early adopters and now has such a large presence in this section of the market that its adoption rate, as shown the Adoption Lifecycle Index, has not jumped massively (an increase from 2.9 to 3.2). However, respondents' view of their adoption of Grid Computing reveals a significant rise from the previous cycle:

* "Modest use in some areas" jumped from 10 percent of organizations to 40 percent.

* In total, 70 percent of organizations now deploy Grid Computing "in some areas", up from 19.5 percent in the previous cycle

This reveals a major increase in pilot projects and departmental grids, as opposed to major migration of legacy environments; these "new" Grid Computing projects are at the leading edge, and point to a significant future rise in Grid Computing as pilots get rolled out across the rest of organizations' IT.

Global Trends in Grid Computing
Examination of the changes in Oracle Grid Index values from the previous cycle (November 2005) reveals several notable facts:

* Asia Pacific continues to progress fastest, with adoption rising significantly. Overall, the region's Oracle Grid Index jumped the most, from 4.9 to 5.3. Furthermore, within the region, understanding of Grid Computing is at last transforming into action - the Adoption Lifecycle Index increased the most, from 2.0 to 2.5.

* The USA continues to lead the other regions in Grid Computing. The overall Grid Index number for the US remains higher than Europe or Asia Pacific, despite being unchanged at 6.1. This Index stability indicates that the maturation process among early adopters in the region is furthest along here, since the US has historically held a higher Grid Index number than the other regions.

* Progress across Europe on the journey to Grid Computing is evening out. The variance of Grid Index numbers across the various European countries is smaller in the latest cycle as the Southern European countries make faster progress.

"All regions show positive movement in the awareness, understanding and adoption of Grid Computing," said Charles Phillips, president, Oracle. "Organizations around the globe are taking advantage of this market-changing technology - adoption is increasing and Grid Computing is exhibiting the classic patterns of a technology that is approaching maturity and preparing itself for entry into the mainstream."

Service-Oriented Architecture(1) (SOA) Ideas Are Becoming Established with Technologists
SOA is an important modern approach to technology that enables IT better and faster to serve business needs. While 76 percent of the IT respondents(2) had heard of SOA, 55 percent of Business respondents remained unaware of it. A further 25 percent of these respondents had heard of SOA, but had little in-depth knowledge.

Among respondents who were familiar with it, the SOA concept was clearly seen as being important:

* Over half of these respondents (57 percent) saw SOA as important, highly important or critical.

* 52 percent of these respondents are already moving towards an SOA - either through a major migration to a single architecture, through ensuring that all new functionality is SOA-based, or through modernizing existing applications.

* Only 17 percent of respondents have no plans to move to an SOA at this stage.

Experts in SOA Emphasize Its Importance
There is a community of experts among the interviewees - nine percent of respondents had implemented an SOA. These "experienced gurus" have a much stronger understanding of the business value an SOA offers:

* SOA Is Important: when asked how important they saw SOA as being to their business, nearly 87 percent of these experts rated it as being highly or critically important.

* SOA Is Manageable: Respondents overall either rated managing an SOA as "a nightmare" (nine percent) or predicted that a complete re-work of management tools would be needed (31 percent). Among the experts, none saw managing SOA as a nightmare and just 12 percent saw the need to replace management tools.

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Notes to Editors

About the Oracle Grid Index
The Oracle Grid Index is designed to map global progress on the journey towards Grid Computing. On behalf of Oracle, Quocirca carries out regular research, selecting and polling over one thousand organizations around the world on their knowledge of, attitudes towards and adoption of Grid Computing. Respondents within each organization are senior decision makers working in lines of business (business respondents) or in the IT function (IT respondents). Numeric data, derived from the answers, gives a single number from 0 to 10 – the Oracle Grid Index. The overall Oracle Grid Index is aggregated from three sub-indices which show preparedness ("Foundation Readiness Index"), Awareness ("Knowledge and Interest Index" and adoption ("Adoption Lifecycle Index").

As well as Grid Computing questions, Oracle uses the opportunity to ask respondents questions on related topics. In the case of the fourth cycle, the main topic was Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).

Quocirca conducted 1466 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers, completed in April 2006. One hundred seventy nine of these were conducted in the USA, 721 in Europe and the remainder (566) in Asia Pacific. Respondents were from a mixture of large multinationals and medium to large national organizations across a broad cross section of industry sectors.

(1) The following definition was used in the preparation of the survey and the interviews: "A Service-Oriented Architecture is a technical environment where business flexibility is supported through the use of technical components or services that can be re-used and brought together to form additional, composite services that work in accordance with pre-defined security, service level and other policies to facilitate business processes."

(2) The respondents to the survey were split into two categories – those who worked directly in the IT function of their organisation ("IT respondents") and those who had line of business responsibilities ("Business Respondents").