Grid Meter » The 451 Group: Financial Sector Grid Adoption Growing Beyond Mere Compute

April 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)

The 451 Group: Financial Sector Grid Adoption Growing Beyond Mere Compute

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The 451 Group yesterday announced their latest "Grid Adoption Research Service Report" -- this time providing an update on the financial services industry's fast-evolving Grid computing usage patterns. The study itself is available to clients only, but in the preview it appears that they have canvassed a very comprehensive list of all the big names on Wall Street that one would hope to see in such an update (Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, BNP Paribas, Bowne, Citigroup, Genworth, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Markit, MassMutual, Nationwide, Royal Bank of Scotland, Societe Generale, TD Bank Financial Group, UBS, Wachovia and WestLB, etc.).

The abstract suggests that Grid adoption in financial services is quickly moving beyond just the compute Grids that support complex simulations (like Monte Carlo) -- and creeping into more all-encompassing resource and data sharing requirements. The abstract also suggests a synergy between the financial services industry's SOA investments and their Grid interests, which is not surprising, given Grid and SOA's common ground in web services standards.

Financial services' aggressive push towards using Grid and SOA as a "fabric"
for tying together IT islands is very consistent with the feedback that Deborah Williams -- leader of the capital markets practice at research firm, Financial Insights -- shared recently with Ian Foster (http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/gridcomputing/story/0,
10801,101350,00.html):

"We have huge integration issues in our industry, I think because of the natural best-of-breed predilection of most of the firms. Over the last 20 years, we've picked the best solutions for the problems."

"So you end up with a very disparate, wide-ranging, siloed kind of architecture. And this over time has led to huge integration issues."

In yesterday's blog entry, I referenced that underutilization is not necessarily considered to be a huge "problem" in enterprise IT. With the commoditization of hardware -- in particular -- folks are generally ok with the fact that they only get X-percent utilization out of existing equipment. Integration, on the other hand, is a HUGE problem that really speaks much more directly to the wallets of IT managers at Global 2000 companies.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on April 19, 2006 06:43 AM

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