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ORACLEWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO -- A riveting video and laser light show drew customers and partners into the opening keynote at the company's OracleWorld conference to hear about the next computing architecture beyond the Internet -- grid computing. "Every OracleWorld is exciting, but some are more important than others. This one is a milestone event," said keynote speaker Chuck Phillips, Oracle's (NASDAQ:ORCL) newest executive vice president, as he welcomed the 20,000 attendees to the event. "It's important to the industry because it ushers in grid computing for the enterprise." Grid computing has traditionally been used in budget-constrained scientific and academic communities for applications requiring the largest computational power. For example, an early version of grid computing linked together low-cost PCs to crunch data in the search of life in outer space. Like these institutions, today's companies face incredible pressure to lower costs, but at the same time, are finding critical information levels growing. To address these needs, Oracle presented its customers and partners with the result of more than 10 years of research and development: an entire Grid Computing software infrastructure, called Oracle10g. "Oracle Grid Computing has three attributes," explained Phillips. "The pooling of (computing) resources in close proximity; the virtualization of the layers within the software infrastructure, allowing the computers to be treated as one; and the ability to load balance across the system, whereby you determine the priorities in order to run your applications across the grid." He added that today companies are forced to buy servers and configure them for peak capacity in order to get the computing power they need, but that this is costly and impractical. The adoption of grid computing in enterprises should translate computing into a utility, which offers reliability and scalability at a much lower cost. While grids have been applied to other utility infrastructures -- water, natural gas and electricity, for example -- they are only now being applied to computing. "It is easy to get skeptical and say that's (grid computing) tomorrow. But we are here to tell you why today is the time," he said. Phillips continued by outlining the conditions that are making grid computing for enterprises a reality today: the pressure to lower costs, the availability of inexpensive commodity blade servers, virtualized Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS), and the latest in network interconnects making server-to-server and server-to-storage connections faster than ever. "Now what you need is the software on top for virtualization and manageability. Oracle has the products that span the stack and that cooperation between the products creates value for you," said Phillips, underscoring Oracle's role in making grid computing a reality. "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts." "This is a culmination of Oracle's strategy," Phillips concluded. "We've been working on this for a decade." Oracle Grid Computing is a "technology breakthrough, yet everything is built on what came before it." OracleWorld San Francisco runs September 7-10 at the Moscone Conference Center.