We keep hearing about Grid computing evolving from big science to enterprise — but there are precious few new ideas about the specific opportunities and business cases behind the evolution. If you’re tired of the insipid ‘aligning IT with business goals’ market-ese on Grid and want some new perspectives, you might want to check out a book that was just released: “Grid Computing: The Savvy Manager’s Guide.”The book is co-authored by Pawel Plaszczak and Richard Wellner — both insiders in the open source Globus Toolkit development project that began ten years ago, and is the nucleus of the Grid computing evolution. These aren’t marketing guys, they have street cred and hands on experience with Grids — and the book reads that way.Initial chapters provide the reader with some good foundation for understanding the fundamentals of Grid. Particularly useful to enterprise end users are the explanations of the importance of OGSA (open grid service architecture) and WSRF (web services resource framework) to the enterprise Grid evolution. The set-up also gives a good amount of discussion to virtualization’s tie-in to Grid, and some clarity in distinguishing Grid from other technologies / concepts (clusters, cycle scavenging, distributed computing, web services, peer-to-peer, etc.). The book goes on to examine what, exactly, enterprise Grid will look like when it becomes more mainstream. From departmental Grids to enterprise and partner Grids — the authors explain how different affinity groups and industries will participate. What sets the book apart from other available literature on Grids is the practical context that it gives for would-be enterprise Grid decisionmakers. From ‘building the business case’ to understanding the motivations / requirements for ‘Grid-enabling’ a product or application — this is a pretty comprehensive look at some of the key business issues related to enterprise Grid. Technology Industry