Tony Bishop, a Wachovia senior vice president and director of product management, said using dedicated servers rather than the grid for the Java applications would be "three times the cost in terms of capital and people to support it."

The eight Wachovia applications running on the grid system are used in internal transactions, such as order management, Bishop said. Each of the applications runs in a J2EE environment on application servers from BEA Systems Inc. and JBoss Inc.

Because the grid system provides resources as needed for the applications, Bishop said, response time has improved on some transactions from 10 msec to 2 msec.

Bishop, who worked for Data-Synapse before he was hired by Wachovia last year, said the improved performance means decisions and services can be made and delivered more rapidly.

"As things get more and more automated and more and more real time, it will be IT that differentiates in this business," Bishop said.