Abstract
Fully-converged Grids and Web Services (WSs) can lead to the development of a new infrastructure that would offer a more powerful set of networking capabilities and features. On one hand, this convergence was favourably looked at, with the expectation of providing better technical solutions to highly complex business problems while, on the other hand, it was seen as an impossible task, bearing considerable risk and presenting many challenges along the way, resulting in a permanent rift between the two paradigms, Grids and WSs. This paper presents an overview of the past and ongoing efforts towards realizing this convergence, its potential benefits and the risks involved and measures to avoid them. Furthermore, we argue that if this convergence is unsuccessful, with future WSs moving away from Grid-oriented principles and implementations, the concept of Grids might fade gradually away, giving way to the competing technologies. The Grid paradigm however offers certain advantages and is in this sense irreplaceable. Faced with the prospects of non-convergence and consequent demise, in order to achieve a viable Grid infrastructure, Grids need to maintain their identity by providing application-oriented, real-world enterprise solutions to business applications. Grid technology would need more and more to be applied in a practical and efficient way to real use cases, to demonstrate its comparative advantage over other competing technologies. In order to fully exploit the potential of WSs, Grid technology needs to come out from its internal tussle of definitions, standards, etc. which has been a major set-back for the future of Grids, not only in the past but also at present, and move forward faster in terms of its implementation in real-world enterprise use cases and applications. Copyright 2009 ACM.