Found an interesting article toting the top 10 strategic technologies of '08.  At a minimum it was really reassuring that gridGISITCS in on the right path.  The Aware Server product, encompasses 4 out of 10 of these.  If you don't mind I'd love to comment on it.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9041738

Green IT

Given that even the most intensive data centers, have less than a 5% average CPU utilization - its actually quite disturbing seeing a shiny new cabinet of servers knowing each server runs a lonely service totally unAWARE of the other machines.  Each service just anxiously waiting for its turn to run - all the meanwhile its machine is consuming power 24/7 and the host is consuming power to keep the environment temperatures regulated.  I could be just a lil biased, however - I think if your enterprise services knew they could be "Aware"  - they might just go on strike until their developers promise to put them on Aware Server ;)

Business process management

Here is one technology strategy that is used loosely - mostly because the word "management" is relative.  Some professionals think that being able to start and stop a business process and report on the process's outcome is management.  Well it is... but it can be so much more.  How about visual display of running workflow's, the time taken at each step, the properties and parameters of each one as well as a complete log and audit trail....  o and did I forget to mention?  Its built right in!  Write the service and "whoop there it is!"-  management and monitoring immediately available.

Virtualization

When virtualization is mentioned most people directly think of server virtualization aka hardware virtualization - in order to get more utilization out of a machine, reduce licensing costs and hopefully give higher reliability and availability (I could go on...)  I agree whole heartedly, but think our sector needs to extend their understanding of virtualization to service virtualization and application virtualization as well.  Spawning up new VM's, rather than new machines - does yield warm and fuzzies, but in many situations the extra overhead of the VM's isn't needed.  Service virtualization truly allows commodity computing and the ability to dynamically provision services to hardware resources based upon load or policy.  Service virtualization allows SOA to be done right!

Computing fabric

I was excited to hear about this!  Distributed computing / grid computing / computing fabric - had previously been something solely for computer science uber ninjas and universities with million dollar grants trying to solve world changing problems.  Aware Server was written by those uber ninjas with the goal of making grid computing easy.  That's exactly what they did, and they didn't stop there...

The Web platform

Patrick Thibodeau says "This is the model for services in the future." and I couldn't agree more.  Given this priority in gridGISTICS we are incredibly pleased to announce that Web Project deployment is fully supported in Aware Server 3.0.  What this means is that you can either go home early on deployment Friday's or you'll have to tell your boss deploying to the web site to the farm no longer takes 6 hours and is now reduced to a key stroke - we won't tell them if you don't :)