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TORONTO -- According to a new study of global Fortune 2000 firms, organizational politics -- not technology -- stands in the way of widespread commercial acceptance of Grid computing. With Grid computing, enterprises can reduce IT costs by collaborating, sharing data and software, and accessing vast amounts of processing power -- without making additional IT investments. Grid computing also offers the potential to effectively align the IT infrastructure with underlying business objectives for greater impact on corporate performance. Despite the significant benefits from Grid computing, such as cost savings and increased performance, the survey revealed that 89% of respondents feel that internal politics, such as 'server-hugging', create significant barriers to widespread Grid adoption. Commissioned by Platform Computing Inc., the study is the first to investigate the non-technical obstacles to Grid computing, with a view to helping organizations gain internal support by educating people within all levels of an organization -- from the IT manager to the CEO -- about the business benefits of Grid computing. According to survey respondents, the top non-technical obstacles (ranked "high" or "very high") to Grid computing include: * Perceived loss of control or access to resources (44%); * Perceived risks associated with enterprise-wide deployment (40%); * Perceived loss or reduction of budget dollars (33%). "We have been advocating a move to more service-oriented approaches, where organizations should care about service levels, not about which servers they own," said Thomas Bittman, Research Analyst, Gartner Inc. "In many companies, organizational or culture issues are keeping companies from becoming more efficient. We need to remove the perception of the application being directly linked to the box -- as we move to virtualized and Grid environments, people need to adapt." Respondents were optimistic about being able to overcome these obstacles if the benefits of Grid computing were reinforced throughout the organization, and if senior executives understood the strategic value of Grid computing to the enterprise. These results suggest that there is a misalignment of corporate and IT objectives relating to strategic IT decisions. While CEOs measure success based on objectives like improving operational efficiency and launching new products to market faster, some individual departments are measuring success based on size of corporate IT resources and budget. "Defining ownership among groups internally, allaying security concerns and identifying the who and how of supporting an enterprise Grid are significant obstacles to effective implementation," said Don Zhao, senior enterprise IS architect, Aventis, a global pharmaceuticals industry leader. "The concepts of collaborating and sharing computing resources in enterprises also require some behavioral changes." "As a result of the political and organizational issues surrounding enterprise-wide Grid deployment, companies are missing major opportunities to dramatically reduce costs, leverage existing IT resources and increase competitive advantage through Grid computing technology," said Ian Baird, Chief Business Architect, Platform Computing. "Over the past ten years, our software has helped organizations around the world save millions in unnecessary IT expenditures, while accelerating drug discovery, improving chip design and speeding financial risk analysis. We are confident that the technological challenges such as standards and security will be overcome. The real challenge is simply getting people to work together, collaborate and share resources." "Grid computing has the potential to provide very significant computing power at a low cost through infrastructure consolidation and cost control," said Dr. Umesh Harigopal, Vice President and Architect at a leading global financial services firm with operations in more than 50 countries. "Unfortunately, some groups see using the Grid as giving up some control over running their applications, and erosion of their resource empires. There are real cultural change problems to Enterprise Grids that will take time to overcome." "There are non-technical barriers to Grid, but they are not insurmountable", said Clive Dawson, Manager, Systems Engineering, AMD. "The increased efficiency and better use of computing resources that can result from Grid computing more than outweigh the challenge of overcoming organizational obstacles." Conducted over a six-week period, the study surveyed 50 global companies in financial services, life sciences, industrial manufacturing and computer manufacturing/EDA that have either implemented Grid computing technology or are evaluating it. Nearly two thirds of companies (64%) were in excess of $1 billion in global revenues, with a combined IT spend in excess of $4 billion according to the META Group's cross-industry average of IT budget as 3.61% of revenues in 2002. According to industry estimates, the worldwide Grid computing market is estimated to grow from US$180 million today to US$4.1 billion by 2005(1). A full report on Platform's survey results is available at www.platform.com/barriers.