Nowadays, enterprises are more and more often a result of mixing physical, virtual and cloud environments. And therefore a single point of management is a prerequisite for meeting SLAs and ensuring that business processes crossing platform, application and even physical borders are completed on time.

The funny thing is: as long as we lack visibility we are still thinking in terms of hurdles and obstacles. But at the moment we can manage physical, virtual and even cloud resources and applications from one pane of glass, we can outpace the disruptions and unify multiple jobs into one coherent process flow.

But even then we are not on target. Because at the very moment we achieve this coherence another effect appears – a boosting performance, made out of end-to-end visibility, seamless workload distribution and unprecedented processing power. Having a closer look at these columns of intelligent service automation one might be reminded of another concept – a connection I hit upon by Theo Priestley, an independent analyst and BPM visionary:

“Who remembers SETI@home, the project run by SETI to harness internet connected PC’s across the globe to help analyse signals from space? It was an early and successful attempt at mass distributed (or grid) computing using a small piece of software to use latent CPU cycles on client machines when the screensaver was engaged.

Now jump forward and the question is why hasn’t anyone taken this concept into the enterprise and into the BPM world itself? If you can imagine the many desktops that exist in an organisation sitting fairly idle when they could act as a BPM grid project to;

• analyse, predict and act upon real-time data,
• alter business rules on the fly,
• creating intelligent workflow,
• perform background simulation and CEP

Why bother with expensive server hardware (and future upgrades etc) when there’s potentially far more power sitting across the organisation not being fully utilised? Are there any examples of this in the BPM industry currently, if so would be good to hear about it.”

Yes Theo, there are examples – potential case studies are queuing up in front of our doors. It seems to me that we randomly adapted this GRID concept to the enterprise. Anyway, technologically we are ready.

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