Prior to my involvement in the Globus Consortium I worked for Ian Foster in the Distributed Systems Laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory. Many of you also know me as the Program and Conference Chair for the last two GlobusWORLD events. In my new role as the President of the Globus Consortium, I'm now working with HP, IBM, Intel, Sun, Nortel and Univa on the commercial advancement of the Globus Toolkit. We all know how widely used and successful the Globus Toolkit has been in science and academia. We're now experiencing a groundswell of enterprise interest in the Globus Toolkit (and particular excitement around the new enterprise capabilities of the Globus Toolkit 4.0) -- so working with the vendors that are addressing this market opportunity has been quite interesting so far.

So why did we decide to create this Globus Consortium newsletter?

First and foremost, because the Globus Consortium and its members believe that the open source Grid movement needs a louder voice in the commercial-level discussions. Our belief is that open source will be the key to Grid in enterprise. Wide scale Grid adoption depends on a standards based infrastructure. This hedges bets against homogeneity and "vendor lock-in," and allows for a diverse, heterogeneous infrastructure. The Consortium is here for the purpose of allowing a set of commercial providers who care about the Toolkit to come together in an open forum and put their thoughts, manpower and money into driving it forward through commercial use. We see this newsletter as a way of documenting the Globus Toolkit's progress in the commercial sector.

Perhaps even more important, we saw the need for a forum where the Grid discussions go deeper than cheerleading and hype, and actually address the obstacles to enterprise adoption. As you'll read in this issue's Q&A with Dan Kusnetzky from IDC, in many ways Grid is at odds with the fundamental buying patterns of enterprise professionals, and most enterprise decision makers are still not very familiar with the Globus Toolkit. As you'll read in Ian Foster's column, there has been general confusion about the difference between organizations like the Global Grid Forum, the Globus Consortium and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. We see this newsletter as a vehicle to clarify misconceptions, proactively identify and discuss specific challenges, and to generally focus the industry dialogue on the open source Grid themes and directions that matter most.

This newsletter will also play a role in tracking specific Grid projects and success stories in the enterprise, so that other organizations contemplating Grid have a nice cache of "lessons learned" to tap into. For all of the great results that the Globus Toolkit has achieved since its creation in the mid-90's, the tracking and measurement of those results (especially in the commercial sector) has not been especially good.

Those who have attended GlobusWORLD know of my penchant for collecting statistics from the Grid computing and Globus Toolkit user community via the on-line registration questions and the printed surveys distributed at the event. I've learned a great deal from these and feel that they present a unique perspective on the Grid computing market that is unequalled. I'd like to share some of these findings with you as well as other information I come across in my capacity as President of the Consortium.

Lastly, I'd like this newsletter to be an effective recruiting tool for new members. I am very excited not only about the projects we have undertaken within the Consortium but also the community we are building of true enterprise class users of the Globus Toolkit. There are certainly enumerated benefits to Consortium membership, but there are also those that are a bit more intangible. The contacts and professional relationships that are being built as members of the Globus Consortium are of great importance and clearly one of the greatest benefits the Consortium presents.

Thank you again for taking the time to read this update. I look forward to reporting on the activities of the Consortium, sharing interesting tidbits on the Grid computing market as we discover them, and certainly including thoughts and feedback from readers in future issues.

-- Greg Nawrocki

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