In what Oracle Corp. calls the mapping of the world’s journey to grid computing, the company released its most recent grid index on Wednesday.

The global score was 4.41 out of a possible 10, up from 3.1 last fall. Canada scored a 4.33. This result is on par with the likes of the U.K. and the Benelux countries, but lagged everyone from the U.S. and Germany to South East Asia and Europe’s Nordic countries. Admittedly, the latter two are the only ones that got a grade over five.

There is, however, a silver lining. Canada is ahead of the global average on service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, with almost 60 per cent of companies interviewed (100) either actively using SOA or intending to become active this year. SOA, viewed as the software precursor to many grid implementations, is often defined as interoperable application services. On the hardware side (blade servers) Canada also fared quite well. Slightly over a third of the Candian companies surveyed are using, or intend to use, these server appliances in the next 12 months -- as compared to about 27 per cent globally.