Carl Claunch, research vice president at analyst Gartner, believes that companies will look at grid computing for two main reasons: power and costs

"The main reason for enterprises to become involved in grid is that they have a large-scale application that they're trying to run, demanding massive amounts of power," he explained. "Companies are also looking to lower the costs of management."

More specifically, companies need to find a business case for installing grid technology. "You need a problem to benefit from a large amount of computing power," said Claunch.

Building a grid, however, will not be easy, and the main challenge is building a custom resource from scratch.

"You can't just go out and buy an all-in-one grid. Every grid today is pretty much unique," said Claunch. "And your organisation has to be comfortable with this sort of customisation."

IT teams delving into grid computing will have to be prepared. "You need to rewrite the applications to be able to benefit from grid, and you need the money to be able to replace existing systems," he explained.

Claunch added that companies willing to take on the medium-to-high risk of investing in grid will be the early adopters of the technology. And he is expecting that grid computing will quickly become more popular in enterprise computing.

"We're expecting to see some maturity in grid in the next one to two years, with specific developments by application vendors for individual vertical industries, such as the financial sector," he said.

Benefits in the financial sector involve clearer manipulation of data. "You can use grid to lower risk substantially by completing more accurate assessments of investments. This will allow you to lower costs to gain a competitive advantage and then you can start to reduce losses."

In terms of suppliers, Claunch is unsure which provider will dominate the grid technology market. "One of the realities of grid is that you layer the technology on top of storage and disk devices," he said.

"Any supplier can put their hardware into a grid. Because this is such a custom market you have components and services from all the different suppliers. It's a substantial integration job for all the vendors," he said.