Grid Meter » Univa announces general availability of enterprise Grid computing software

April 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Univa announces general availability of enterprise Grid computing software

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Enterprise Grid start-up Univa has announced the general availability of its "Univa Globus Enterprise" (UGE) product, an "open standards platform for deploying enterprise Grid solutions." The official G.A. follows the beta announcement back in December.

There are a few particularly interesting aspects to how Univa is describing its product.

First, it's a commercial open source platform for deploying Grid solutions (i.e., the benefits of open source, minus the headaches of installation / configuration that usually accompany raw open source ... AND lets you pick and choose from other best-of-breed open source Grid solutions and easily plug them in for your specific needs). Second, Univa has really emphasized "data availability" as a key differentiator (CTO Steve Tuecke previously discussed the large enterprise data management issues that Univa is tackling).

Another interesting element to Univa's positioning is that it's emphasizing "what's possible" with Grid ... rather than presenting it as a fix to enterprise problems. I think that too many Grid solutions today are being presented as a fix, usually to underutilization of resources. What's slippery about that is that underutilization is generally NOT perceived as a mission critical problem. And realistically -- how many enterprise end users are going to stick their neck out and choose Grid computing as the fix to their overall data and resource integration problems (current market numbers suggest that's not happening at a very rapid pace right now)?

So Univa is instead appealing to the imaginations of IT decisionmakers by suggesting the competitive edge that Grid can provide -- in getting a product to market faster, discovering or designing something better or sooner, etc. This is really what's going to push enterprise adoption. It's going to happen first in R&D (which most closely resembles the research / scientific world where Grid's origins are) and then slowly start creeping into more mainstream production environments.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on April 17, 2006 10:29 AM

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