Grid Today has run a number of good articles over the last week around SOA.Art Sedighi, Senior Consulting Engineer at DataSynape illustrated the link between SOA and Grid. “As remote execution or Remote Procedure Call (RPC) has evolved to Web services, batch systems have evolved to Grid computing — allowing us to think of the two technologies as complementary.”Art makes this point to show that Grid computing has a home in the SOA environment by being a key enabler for system elements that make SOA run. “Grid computing software can take care of resource management for your enterprise and virtualize your underlying infrastructure and available resources. It takes control of your resources, schedules services to run as requests come in, prevents denial of service attacks and meets Quality-of-Service requirements set forth by users.”ComputerWeekly also ran an article with a different perspective on SOA. The author makes the argument that his investigation has caused him to draw the conclusion that SOA leads to increased complexity and transitively, reduced reliability.Derrick Harris, in an analysis of insights given to him by Gartner’s Carl Claunch makes the following statement:“If Claunch is correct in saying that ‘Grid, today … is being driven mostly by being able to achieve something that’s otherwise impossible,’ perhaps it would be wise for Grid vendors to focus (more than they already are) on selling Grid computing as a business advantage versus a solution to pre-existing problems — especially if enterprises are already looking elsewhere to address these issues.”Derrick’s point is a good one and just might be the stone needed to kill two birds. Grid Computing could be given a raison d’etre, and Grid vendors could take some of the complexity out of SOA. Technology Industry