Grid and SOA - Friends or Foes?

Think of how we need to look at data and product flows up and down the value chains of suppliers and customers.

Think of how we need to be fleeter of foot than our competitors. Now look at your existing environment - how rapidly can you change a business process that is automated by your existing infrastructure?

How would you cope with a 300 per cent increase in requirements for an item through your ordering system and through your ERP system - never mind your actual production system?

Now think how much easier this would be if your total infrastructure was virtualised - all servers being able to be called upon as a single compute environment, all storage available as a single mega-data warehouse.

Then look at how easy it would be to change direction on the fly if your business processes could call upon technical functionality at will, and how these discrete pieces of technical functionality could be re-used across multiple different processes, could be plugged in and plugged out as better functionality emerges, and even as to how members of your value chain could share the same functional components to ensure consistency and workflow efficiencies.

Is an SOA based on grid a good option for manufacturing and logistics? You bet. Should you jump in to both on an enterprise level straight away?

No. Take the approach of gridding specific areas of functionality as advanced clusters with SOA capabilities, and then merge these grids together as time goes on.

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