The latest Oracle grid index research showed that the region posted a 4.9 grid index, behind North America with 5.8 and Europe with 5.1.

Grid computing is the pooling of IT resources into a single set of shared services for all enterprise computing needs.

Roger Scott, vice president for technology sales consulting of Oracle Asia Pacific expects more large organizations to adopt grid computing.

Although Asia Pacific has a lower overall grid index, it has a higher foundation readiness score of 7.1 than North America with 7 and Europe of 6.2.

To increase the level of adoption, Scott said it requires a strong commitment from the management of companies, the support and endorsement from governments, third party independent software vendors changing to the grid computing environment and the establishment of standard bodies and alliances that support grid computing.

Three global independent bodies are involved in grid computing — Globus Alliance, a group that conducts research and development for academic grids; Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium of leading vendors and customers focused on developing enterprise grid solutions, and Global Grid Forum, the standards body for defining standard specifications for global grids.

The research conducted by Quorica showed that within the Asia Pacific region, Southeast Asia leads in adoption rate with a grid index of 5.9 after the United States and Nordic with 6.1.

Martin Power, manager, information systems of Australian-based Holmesglen Institute of TAFE said it would take a longer period of time for small countries to adopt the grid computing technology.

From Sun Microsystems’ point of view, it would depend on the investments of multinational companies (MNCs), said Dr. Simon See, director and chief technologies of Sun Microsystems.

He cited India a fast adopter of grid computing because of the highly IT literate people who adopt technology and pick up the latest IT trends.

Dr. See partly attributed the low adoption in grid computing to the problem of perception such as security risks.

The survey showed that in absolute numbers, India has shown the biggest improvement in adopting grid computing.

From an indices perspective, the fact that respondents indicated a high score for knowledge but low for adoption, highlights the need to demonstrate further the benefits of grid computing to businesses in the region.

By harnessing many smaller computers working together as one, grid computing provides organizations with the flexibility to meet changing business needs, delivers the highest quality of service at the lowest cost and provides investment protection and rapid return on investment.

Nick Evered, senior vice president for technology of Oracle Asia Pacific said that grid computing could deliver lower cost, higher availability, better quality of service, more automation and greater productivity.

"Grid computing could improve Asia’s competitiveness. Although organizations in Asia have made solid investments building the foundations for grid computing, they have yet to adopt at levels equal to the rest of the world," said Evered.

Oracle is seeing many companies worldwide using grid computing for their business. The research showed that companies are preparing to adopt it for core business systems as a priority area.

Grid computing creates flexibility to changing needs. It enables an organization to tie its business architecture through service level agreements to its IT architecture.

With grid computing architecture, organizations can quickly and easily create a large-scale computing infrastructure from inexpensive, off-the-shelf components like server blades and commodity storage.

As more companies deploy clusters of industry standard servers and service-oriented architectures (SOA), IT infrastructures resembling enterprise grids will naturally result.

IT departments looking to move to grid computing need to focus on three tasks — consolidation of hardware, applications and information shared among one or more data centers; standardization of servers, storage and operating systems and automation that involves the implementation of automated provisioning of resources.

The Oracle grid index research has identified the link between senior executive involvement in IT strategy and corresponding business growth.

Of those organizations experiencing business growth, senior management was always involved in setting IT strategy in 73 percent of cases.

By contrast, where senior executives were never involved in this aspect of the business, growth was only experienced in 36 percent of cases.

Focusing on IT infrastructure in particular, Oracle’s findings indicate than an understanding of the need for sound technology platforms among senior business management correlates with increase business growth, 64 percent of those firms where there is the case are experiencing growth.

Oracle’s grid infrastructure pools IT resources into a single virtual computer that analysis demand and adjusts accordingly.

An independent study has shown that over the next five years, customers can achieve 105 percent return on investment (ROI) using Oracle grid products.