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September 30, 2005 | Comments: (0)

The Psychology of Early Grid Adopters

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As the industry gets more familiar with the general Grid computing adoption trend-lines, we're starting to see the analyst firms drill down more on specific vertical markets. The 451 Group, for example, just released a report on "Grid Computing -- Adoption for Digital Media Creation and Distribution." It's refreshing to see the discussion expand beyond the traditional (pharma, financial services, energy) markets.

This write-up summarizes some of the key findings of that report, and I found this quote to be particularly interesting:

"A big difference between the film industry and other vertical markets is the technology is being used by people who think of themselves foremost as artists, not enterprise IT end users."

While this point may be fairly obvious, I believe that it does indeed apply to many other vertical markets as well, and is one of the primary barriers of widespread adoption. Quite simply, Grid computing needs to be a transparent technology before it is widespread. How many of us would be browsing the web if we had to hand assemble http queries in a telnet window?

Even though most IT end users tend to think more about their day jobs than what's behind their displays or network cables, there are a few who take the extra step. These are the early adopters that are working to figure out what will make that transparency possible.

One of the reasons I am looking forward to GridWorld next week is to get a chance to meet some of those early adopters. I look forward to hearing the stories of successes and failures that led to their ultimate deployment of Grid.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on September 30, 2005 01:38 PM

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