A new industry organization, the Globus Consortium, is being formed today to promote grid computing in commercial enterprises. Featured participants include Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Univa. Intel’s participation was revealed just this morning. Absent from this list of high-level companies are Microsoft and Oracle, a key grid proponent. At press time, I’m still trying to find out why. Formation of the new Globus Consortium brings to four the number of organizations promoting grid, although there may be a few more that I can’t think of right now. The new group is focused on extending the open source source Globus Toolkit for enterprise usage. Other organizations promoting grid include the Globus Alliance, Enterprise Grid Alliance and Global Grid Forum. Similar to the plethora of organizations promoting various aspects of Java, IT developers and managers now will be hard-pressed to keep track of which organization is doing what in grid. This makes me wonder why the enterprise work could not be done in one of the existing grid organizations and what kind of overlap there will be amongst the various groups. Grid presents the promise of more complete usage of compute cycles distributed around a network. But did the world really need another industry consortium to boost grid? Is it me, or does forming another industry organization seem like a reflex action in technology endeavors? Good luck to the participants in these grid organizations. May they avoid overlap and gridlock in their various deliberations. Technology Industry