We've had some posts covering Sun Microsystems flavor of grid computing (here and here) as well as some new skillls CIOs will need in a world of grid computing. Now Oracle has recently announced that seven customers who adopted enterprise
grid computing infrastructures are "on track to achieve an average of
150 percent return on investment (ROI) over five years, according to a
third-party study." From MCADCafe,

"According to Mainstay Partners' findings,
Oracle 10g customers are achieving substantial savings -- on average
150 percent ROI and 43 percent internal rate of return are predicted
over five years. Oracle 10g helps customers to reduce hardware costs
through consolidation as well as reduce software license and
maintenance costs.

Study participants achieved a 123 percent average savings on
hardware in the first year with projected hardware savings of 278
percent over five years. Additionally, the customers have considerably
improved their availability by moving from a single- or dual-node
environment to a multi-node environment, dramatically increasing
availability. Each of the study participants has improved business
continuity with disaster recovery times reduced from three or four
hours to minutes."

Hopefully the IRR related to customer savings will also translate to good news for venture-backed firms like Voltaire, which develops interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing and has high-profile deployments like NASA and CERN. The solutions have been recently tuned and deployed on Oracle 10g. Voltaire has drawn $50 million in capital to date from firms like baker Capital and Pittango Venture Capital.

Steve Shu