Well, for a broad assortment of integrators, ISVs and VARs, grid computing is just that technology. Less than a decade ago, grid was the domain of geeks working with Cray Research supercomputers in glass-enclosed data centers. Today, it's the buzzword du jour, embraced by IBM as the centerpiece of its on-demand strategy and positioned by Sun Microsystems as the hot technology that will take the company's vision of network computing to the next level.

In many ways, grid is perhaps the biggest new opportunity to come along in the channel in years, as grid players anxiously look to line up partners. Specifically, three high-profile Tier 1 vendors—Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun—are all making grid moves and seeking partners. And an oligopoly of bigfoot ISVs, which dominate the grid space—United Devices, Platform Computing and DataSynapse—are also seeking VARs to help stoke sales.

Clearly, the market opportunity is big. According to Insight Research, Boonton, N.J., worldwide grid spending will grow from an estimated $250 million in 2003 to $4.89 billion in 2008. For VARs, selling even a small grid can mean a big payday: A setup with 50 to 100 CPUs will run about $50,000 (depending on the services and hardware bundled in), and larger grids can go into the millions.

But if grid sounds like a reseller nirvana that's poised to take off, it is, nevertheless, fraught with pitfalls for the unwary VAR. For one, there's a steep learning curve, which makes it much more complex than simply selling and integrating out-of-the-box hardware. While no company has done more to build the cachet of grid than IBM, HP and Sun also have heated up their grid offerings in recent months. Lately, grid vendors of all stripes have been spewing forth heavy marketing hype, sowing some customer confusion in the process.

"Nobody can seem to really agree on what grid is," says Ian Baird, CTO for grid and utility computing at EMC in Hopkinton, Mass. In reality, grid has several facets, Baird says. "It's distributed computing on steroids," he explains. "It's typically heterogeneous, so you're connecting together all sorts of different compute resources from different vendors."

For solution providers wondering whether to get in on the ground floor, the unanswered question remains whether grid computing is overhyped. Experts agree that it pretty much depends on what you call grid. If your definition centers on the lower-end technologies, such as utility computing (see "Utility And On-Demand Differ From True Grid," below), then grid probably has promised more than it has delivered. If, however, you define grid as a "true grid" of interconnected clusters, then maybe it's just coming into its own.

"Things like utility computing and on-demand are business models for delivering computing," explains Greg Papadopoulos, CTO at Sun Microsystems. Papadopoulos has perhaps a more rarified definition of grid technology. "Grid is an example of network-scaled computing," he says.

Lest you think that's an overly scientific definition—Papadopoulos used to be a computer-science professor at MIT—he readily relates it to a real-world example. "Network-scaled computing is something like Google, where you've got hundreds of thousands of processors that are being applied to a task," he explains. "The only way you can think about doing this is by placing the network at the center of all those machines."

In such wildly complex environments, the challenge for grid providers, Papadopoulos says, "is, how do you program them, what is going to be the operating environment, how do you manage them, how do you do [on the network] all the things that you'd do on a single system?"

Those are precisely the questions asked by vendors and VARs who've wondered how they can prove to customers that grid is a technology with a quick payoff. The answer seems to be, "Start small and get your foot in the door."

"We've sold some very large hardware deals where the initial thought was, 'All we're going to be doing is some services and nothing else,'" says Steve Gordon, the executive in charge of IBM's grid-computing organization. He points to brokerage house Charles Schwab, which in 2003 enlisted Big Blue to install a pilot grid that's currently undergoing a large-scale expansion.

"What was initially sold was an in-house application they needed to run while they were talking to a customer," Gordon explains. "High-wealth clients would call with a question about some financial calculation. It took too long to get an answer, so [Schwab] had to hang up and call the customer back. Now, with the grid, they get the answer right when the customer's on the phone because the application runs during that time frame."

When the pilot program proved a success, cutting some customer wait times from 4 minutes to 15 seconds, Schwab signed on IBM to expand the grid.

Such a two-step approach to rolling out a grid is a typical strategy. "Most deployments start small," explains Ed Hubbard, president and founder of grid ISV United Devices in Austin, Texas. "Everybody has heard about grid computing, but most people don't really know what it can do for them. We usually do a pilot, where we take an application and migrate it onto a grid made up of Windows and Linux servers, cluster nodes, nondedicated devices and workstations."

The network is usually up and running—with the grid application installed and buzzed out—in a day or two. "Then you can show the customer what kind of return they can get on their grid," Hubbard says.

VAR Entree
For VARs looking to grab such customers, partnering is the quickest path to a payoff. The good news is that all the major grid vendors and ISVs are actively engaged in partner recruitment. But, given the complexities of grid technology, not all resellers are considered qualified to hook up with the most attractive vendors.

"We have to look at recruiting the right reseller—somebody who understands data-center practices, complex pools of servers and services in the data center," says Steve Campbell, Sun's grid guru. "This would not be a white-box reseller; it would be more of a systems integrator. It's not somebody that just buys and sells boxes."

From the perspective of the smaller VAR, there is indeed a lot on the line, and they're dipping their toes into the grid waters cautiously. That's the story at Insbridge, a newly minted grid partner of IBM.

"The grid marketplace is still in its infancy from our standpoint," says Tom Mant, vice president of sales at Insbridge, a Plano, Texas-based VAR that sells software and solutions to the insurance industry. The company has been working to get its software certified on IBM hardware and to craft a marketing and sales message through which it can approach its client base.

To mitigate its risk, Insbridge's market approach involves heavy hand-holding from Big Blue. "In the sales cycle, we'll be working in conjunction with the IBM sales force," Mant says. "So if an insurance company is looking to adopt a grid-computing infrastructure, during our sales cycle we can say that we support grid and that we're an application IBM has certified in that space."

Effectively, Insbridge is off-loading its risk onto IBM. Big Blue handles most of the heavy technology lifting, whereas Insbridge provides the entree into the insurance customer base. That's a win-win strategy for attacking grid that many Tier 1 vendors mimic as they scout about for reseller partners servicing profitable customer niches. From the VAR's perspective, the link with IBM is a pain-free way to enter the grid arena.

"Because of the low cost for us to get started, we saw it as a real opportunity to move forward with a significant upside and little downside," Mant sums up. "We see this as something that's going to have real business attached to it."

Tech Tie-Ins
Another route toward promulgating the technology is the one taken by RLX Technologies, a blade-server systems builder based in The Woodlands, Texas. RLX is offering grid capability as an add-on option to its blades. That's seen as an attractive sell, as blades are being adopted in droves by customers rushing to consolidate their servers.

"Blades are a natural building block," says Bob VanSteenberg, CTO and vice president of platform development at RLX Technologies. "Once you've mastered the ability to scale out among multiple machines in a single center, then it's the logical next step to scale out across multiple centers and do grid computing."

VanSteenberg does not believe that grid is yet all that easy a sell outside of the high-performance computing arena where his customer base lies and technical applications rule. "By definition, these big corporate enterprises are conservative," he notes. Still, he sees grid as a coming thing and believes it'll take off as ISVs demonstrate they can effectively manage the distribution of workloads across multiple sites.

Any VAR looking to migrate their customers to grid would do well to remember that one way to whet buyer interest is to tie the technology into something that has already caught fire in the enterprise. Think business-process integration as one possibility. That's a tack pursued by Ascential Software, a Westborough, Mass.-based ISV.

"Say someone has a business initiative which may be deploying CRM, sales-force automation or other mission-critical applications," says Mike Beckerle, chief scientist at Ascential. "They have to work out what kind of business processes are going to change and then figure out the implications for the information they have in the enterprise. Depending on the size of the problem, they'd either deploy a multiple-CPU symmetric multiprocessing system or bring in a grid-type solution."

Beckerle notes that most of the solutions Ascential has sold have been in larger enterprises with thousands of CPUs. He thinks that's poised to change—that grid will begin to move downstream as its advantages begin to permeate the consciousness of the business world in general. "Our software is basically the same, whether it's running on four CPUs or 4,000 CPUs," he says.

Fork In the Road
Indeed, it's becoming increasingly evident that grid computing is reaching a fork in the road. For VARs looking to capitalize on that growth, the big opportunity may come as grid moves beyond the large enterprises served by direct-sales organizations toward midsize organizations that haven't yet cottoned on to grid.

"The midmarket is now just starting to say, "Maybe we ought to have a look at this,'" says John Crocker, co-founder and managing partner of Enterprise Iron, a financial-services integrator in Iselin, N.J. He says that, at large customers, it's easy to walk in the door and start talking grid. For most other enterprises, however, grid is more in the way of another widget in the software tool box.

"In the middle market, where we have found the most appetite for grid is among companies already looking at upgrading their network infrastructure," Crocker adds. "It's at the point where, even if they're not looking at grid, you can introduce it. They figure as long as they're redoing their network anyway, the incremental cost might not be that great."

Not quite so sanguine is veteran VAR Ann Fried, chairman of Microway, a systems builder in Plymouth, Mass. "A year from now, I think [grid] is a solution you can pitch," she says. "Right now, for the medium- to large-size VARs that are not Tier 1 players, I think it's not as productive as it will be in the future."

"There's a lot of interest and a lot of optimism, but the smaller customers are very cautious," adds Fried, who knows a thing or two about the subject as a partner of grid ISV Platform and a seller of large clusters to university and government customers.

As with all issues that elicit the full gamut of opinions, the reality of where grid is today probably lies between the two extremes. "Resellers will help facilitate grid," Sun's Papadopoulos affirms. "Resellers [will] became very important in how these systems will come together to serve companies. Grid is another tool in their toolbox. We're going to make it progressively easier to use, and that's going to make it more accessible to the channel and the midsize market."

"Until six or nine months ago, grid was the latest fad," Crocker adds. "That led to a good deal of hype, and hurt sales. Now, the fad has moderated. What's going on is a deeper understanding of what grid can do and the benefits that can be derived from it. People are now calmly assessing grid."

With a growing consensus that grid is, at the very least, poised to make a move, the final action item for resellers is, how do they get ready to sell this stuff? Whether it's a VAR or an ISV, the most common advice is to partner. For its part, IBM recognizes the key role resellers will play, particularly in vertical markets. "We're trying to create a whole ecosystem, because it all works together," Gordon says. Accordingly, Big Blue is rounding up application providers who can deliver grid software or custom solutions, and resellers with customer bases in different verticals.

"This isn't just for the big guys," Gordon adds. "VARs could focus in on infrastructure solutions. Or, for the more integration-focused resellers, on services, because there's a tremendous services opportunity for people to cobble together the grid solutions."

Caught between the strategies of smaller VARs like Insbridge, which are aligning themselves with big vendors like IBM and Sun, and the big vendors themselves, which are corralling resellers to target industry verticals, are the grid ISVs themselves. They're forced to play both angles, hooking up with the big guys so that their solutions get mindshare in the big accounts, and making nice with VARs of their own in a bid to target customers—such as SMB accounts—that don't tend to get direct sales calls.

For example, as the newest of the major grid ISVs, United Devices uses a direct sales force domestically but has a healthy reseller network in Japan, where it lacks local market expertise. But it's not averse to expanding its partner base stateside. "We're open to working with anybody that has customers interested in grid," United Devices' Hubbard says. "We can help the VAR build their own expertise, we can go in with them and service a customer jointly, or we can handle all the services ourselves if the VAR doesn't want to become an expert in grid."

Still, specialized selling will remain the rule for this technology, and at least one member of the pitching team will have to have heavy-duty expertise. "We say grids are built, not bought," opines Sara Murphy, HP's grid-marketing manager. "Each deployment is going to be different."

Maybe grid will start to surge forward once its advocates refine their marketing message. That goes against the grain of Ascential's Beckerle, who thinks many of the folks pushing grid are going about it the wrong way. "A lot of the argument for grid computing is a cost-down argument," he says. "We're constantly trying to tell people that's wrong...It's really a value-up argument—you can now do stuff with these computers that you could never have imagined doing before because they're so effective at processing data."

For those who have hooked up with the right grid dance partners, the industry's financial tea leaves seem to bode well for the future. "The one interesting thing I've seen over the past 12 months is the first emergence of customers that have grid budgets," Hubbard says. "A couple of years ago, there was no one that had a budget with grid computing on it. Most of the global 2000 will have to dip their toes in the grid waters at some point."