Great Global Grid

About the Book

Emerging Technology Strategies and the Great Global Grid

The next generation of the Internet will produce dramatic economic and social changes exceeding even the World Wide Web. Several emerging technologies are converging to create a Great Global Grid infrastructure where universal connectivity to large computing resources will be available for consumers and enterprises. The goal of this book is to provide a systematic survey of the full spectrum of Great Global Grid technologies from an enterprise viewpoint.

The Great Global Grid - The range of technologies comprising the Great Global Grid is very wide. One of the main contributions of the book is to categorize these technologies in detail and to explain the dependencies among them. The technologies include:

• Application Servers and Portals
• Enterprise Application Integration and B2B Middleware
• Web Services and XML Messaging
• Peer-to-Peer Collaboration
• Pervasive Computing: Middleware and Software Platforms
• Distributed Resource Managers, Clusters and Grids
• Global Grid Middleware
• Conclusions for the Future

Emerging Technology Strategies - The book does not hype these technologies or their benefits. Section 1 of the book describes examples of past emerging technologies that failed to realize their initial vision. Based on the lessons learned from these experiences, a pragmatic technology evaluation template is created that includes:

• Overview of the technology
• Relationships to other technologies
• Important technical and business trends
• Specific applications
• Industry and official standards
• Vendor overview by application area
• Leading implementation approaches
• Advice on deployment
• Future technical and business directions
• Recommendations

Audience - The information collected in this book is not available from any other single source. The broad range of technologies, standards and vendors covered is necessary to understand the future enterprise applications of the Internet. The following groups should find the contents of this book especially valuable.

• Decision makers for the evaluation strategy and discussions of current products, standards and open issues
• Developers and architects for the overview of many advanced software technologies and their relationships
• Consultants for the industry analysis of vendors and business applications
• Futurists for the trends and research that are the basis of the next generation Internet
• Students for the industrial applications and open source projects

About the Author

Dr. Robert Marcus has worked in many different areas of information technology and software development. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Emerging Technology Strategies in Boulder, Colorado. His previous experience includes Director of Technology Transformation and Deployment at General Motors, CTO of Rogue Wave Software, VP of Technical Strategy at the MCC Research Consortium, Director of Object Technology at American Management Systems, Coordinator of Object Technology at Boeing, and Advanced Technology Software Engineer at HP. He was the lead organizer of the 2001 Software Services Grid Workshop that initiated discussions among the leaders of the Grid, object and Web standards communities.