By david.chappell on January 2, 2008 6:06 PM
Grid computing will grip the attention of enterprise IT leaders, although given the various concepts of hardware grids, compute grids, and data grids, and different approaches taken by vendors, the definition of grid will be as fuzzy as ESB. This is likely to happen at the end of 2008.
At least one application in the area of what Gartner calls "eXtreme Transaction Processing" (XTP) will become the poster child for grid computing. (see Gartner Research ID # G00151768 - Massimo Pezzini). This "killer app" for grid computing will most likely be in the financial services industry or the travel industry. Scalable, fault tolerant, grid enabled middle tier caching will be a key component of such applications.
Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) will finally become a well understood ingredient for achieving realtime insight into business process, business metrics, and business exceptions. New offerings from platform vendors and startups will begin to feverishly compete in this area.
Service Component Architecture (SCA) will become the new way for SOA applications to be defined as support from all the major platform vendors (sans Microsoft) will be rolled out.
New lightweight containers models will become more prevalent, with continuing adoption of Spring, OSGi, and EJB3.
Web 2.0 applications will start to become more prevalent in enterprises. Many initial successes of quick and dirty, Enterprise Mashups with attractive looking RIA style applications that include Flex, IM, and threaded discussion groups will be developed for useful business applications such as collaborative workflows. The associated hype will leave some wondering why they are embarking down the path of long term SOA projects with similar goals in mind.
Some of those Web 2.0 applications will fail, with an important piece of the user interface just not showing up one day because one of the supporting feeds just isn't there any more. The guy who mashed it up in the first place doesn't work there anymore, and many will be scrambling to figure out who is supposed to fix it, and who to point the finger at.
As a result, a renewed focus on governance will emerge. Industry pundits and thought leaders who had previously been strong proponents of SOA governance will passionately start evangelizing the antithetical concept of building process and governance into the creation of enterprise mashups.
By end of year it will be clear that an understanding of infrastructure requirements for common problems such as predictable scalability, reliability, security, (*-ilities) will be necessary in order to support any combination of SOA, REST, or Web 2.0 style applications. However the exact architecture or even the list of requirements in support of such infrastructure will not be well understood or agreed upon. Such a common understanding will not come to bear until at least 2010. This will be the new frontier to explore in the coming years.
Oh yeah, and Dave Chappelle will make a huge comeback this year, but without the $50M contract. :)
