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Industry and Business Involvement

Industry and business leaders were quick to understand that accomplishments of Grid Computing could be beneficial for their activity. This process was accelerated by the fact that several industries and businesses were active and financially contributing partners in academic and research like Grid projects, not only in EU funded projects but also in MS projects. In nearly every GridCoord country there was a strong effort to attract industry involvement and participation.

Many leading organizations today are harnessing the knowledge of e-Science Grid professionals and applying their expertise to challenging environments in their enterprise. These companies are interested in competitive advantage, not publicity, and see the Grid as a means to an end, a smarter way to run their IT infrastructure.

France

The RNRT, RNTL and VTHD programmes have been instrumental in the development of grid technology in France and had large part of the industry (IBM, Sun, HP and others) involvement. Some main projects (VTHD++) are even led by the industry. Some start-ups have been successful, for example GridXpert, a pioneer and the European leader in On-demand resource management. GridXpert helps companies in Manufacturing, Life-Sciences, Energy and Finance to optimize their collaborative and multidisciplinary computing processes, and has just been bought by the American United Devices. Icatis can also be mentioned, which was created by academic reserachers from INRIA , and which helps set up easily a Computational Grid within an organization by harvesting unused computing resources.

Germany

Many hard- and software vendors supported Unicore: Cray, Fujitsu-Siemens, Genias (later taken over by SUN), Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Platform, Pallas (later taken over by Intel), SGI, SUN, T-Systems. Additional industrial partners participate in the D-Grid initiative with the aim to benefit from know-how and available technology.

Hungary

Companies have been involved in the Hungarian Grid projects since 2002 but 2004 was a real turning point in Hungary considering the industry and business aspects of the Grid and the relationship of Hungarian companies to the Grid. Compaq Hungary Ltd. was involved in the SuperGrid project in 2002-2003 but their participation was rather formal. In 2004 HP Hungary showed real interest in participating in the newly launched NKFP Grid project and they want to play a leading role in the project. T-Com, the largest Hungarian Telco, has been showing significant interest in Grid technology since April 2004.

Italy

In the past years R&D activities have produced a large variety of middleware components, most of them available under an Open Source licence. Thanks to their extensive exploitation in several large research e-Infrastructures, Datagrid, LHC Computing Grid, EGEE, these components begin to have the quality in terms of functionality, robustness and reliability to provide effective solutions for industry and business. Two industrial projects apply and customize the software development tools of Grid.it, in particular the ASSIST programming environment and the Knowledge Discovery Services. A first level of bottom up coordination between research organisations and Industries interested in Grid developments was established in early 2003 by the IG-BIGEST (Italian Grid for e-Business, e-Industry e-Government and e-Science & Technology) initiative, co-ordinated by INFN. The initiative involved all major National Research Institutions, Universities and Computing Centres, as well as many industries, ready to cope with a pioneering effort in the experimental utilization and application of grid technologies. Other industrial activities on the application of Grid.it tools are starting, promoted by ASI, in the context of Environment, Civil Protection and Disaster Prevention

The Netherlands

VL-e and LOFAR are the only Grid projects with participation from industrial research partners. In VL-e this participation comprises the middleware industry (IBM), service-providing industries (IBM, Logica/CMG) as well as end-user industries (Philips research and Philips medical, Unilever and DSM research as well as FEI, an Electron Microscope provider). LOFAR has IBM as its most important computing partner.

Poland

The PIONIER programme has strong industry and business links. All the projects are funded 50% by the Ministry of Science and 50% by industrial partners. So far the vendors such as IBM, Sun, HP participated in the project. Additionally a partner from media industry, Polish national TV broadcasting company, and some other IT companies participated in the projects bringing their own, significant contribution.

Spain

Our research reveals that Spanish industries have had a quite limited involvement in Grid projects. Four Spanish companies are partners in EU-funded FP6 Grid-related projects (Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, GridSystems, Deimos, and ISOCO). A number of other Spanish companies were partners in Grid projects within FP5.

No information available.

Sweden

No information available.

UK

The programme has quickly demonstrated the utility of e-Science in business and industry resulting in a major collaborative industrial programme with participation from the engineering, pharmaceutical, petro-chemical, media and financial sectors (involvement of some 80 commercial companies). The National e-Science centre does a lot of joint funding with the UK DTI, and as a result have produced some compelling commercial-level Grid Projects in which e-Science and enterprise Grid professionals work together. In addition a large number of companies are engaged in e-Science projects ranging from major national companies to SMEs.

Conclusion

Funding policies in the European Member States are diverse. Each of the states have slightly different strategic views and follow therefore a different research agenda. Europe as a whole can benefit from the diversity – which puts it in a unique position as compared to the US. On the other hand, it seems that without guiding support of the European Commission, the synergy available in the various MS initiatives and projects cannot be utilized. .Tbd