Grid Meter » Univa - hot Enterprise Grid vendor to watch in '06

January 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Univa - hot Enterprise Grid vendor to watch in '06

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Univa is a rather obvious addition to the 2006 watch list.

With the recent beta announcement of Univa Globus Enterprise (PDF), the company is officially opening the doors for business and is the first Grid start-up assuming the services / support / distribution model role for the open source Globus Toolkit (similar to Red Hat's role supporting Linux).

Not only will Univa satisfy the proverbial "throat to choke" requirement for enterprise Grid end users -- they are developing their own GT features and extensions that will make the Globus Toolkit truly "enterprise ready."

Even so, Univa understands that Grids are never as simple as popping in a disk and letting it go. To that effect they have built a world-class professional services organization that will be instrumental in the uptake of their software and the proliferation of Grids in general. As an additional benefit, professional services are also a key feedback mechanism to product development. In a nascent market loosely defined as "Grid computing," where there is still debate about exactly what "Grid computing" means, such feedback into product development is absolutely essential. For this reason, there are a ton of enterprise Grid users, and more importantly, potential users that are watching Univa with great interest.

There is also the fact that the founders of Univa are the definitive pioneers / inventors of the Globus Toolkit. Steve Tuecke, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman were also key players in laying the groundwork for the standards on which most Grids are built -- and bar none, no one "gets" Grids (and enterprise requirements thereof) to the extent that these guys do.

So what does a value add layer, and providing enterprise class support and professional services to the open source Globus Toolkit really mean?

The Survey conducted at GlobusWORLD 2005 asked users, "What are your greatest concerns about implementing the Globus Toolkit?" One of the major concerns that arose was that there was no commercial report for the Globus Toolkit. Now there is.

There is little question as to how pervasive the Globus Toolkit is in the research and academic communities. It is often referred to as the de facto standard for Grid computing middleware. Now that commercial support no longer an issue, I believe that it is only a matter of time before we see a similar pervasiveness in enterprise. The analogy has been made before, but the similarities to the Red Hat - Linux story are too coincidental to be dismissed.

As for competition, with the Univa development of UGE as a catalyst for enterprise uptake of the Globus Toolkit and strong ties with Grid computing heavies like IBM - it's not going to be easy to overtake these guys as the leading services / support / distribution provider for enterprise Grids.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 10, 2006 07:02 AM

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