From Grid… to Cloud… to Business with BEinGRID

BEinGRID is coming today to a key transition stage. The project financed by the EC is ending but the achievements are taken forward in IT-Tude.com. Over the past four years the EBEinGRID has identified clear business needs to be met by Grid technologies. And the results demonstrated at this week's ICSOC event show how businesses may profit from distributed computing - from Grid to Cloud solutions.

BEinGRID has successfully conducted real-world experiments targeting industry and research organisations to provide, use and validate Grid technologies to meet business challenges. With close to 100 partners coming from top industrial and academic research, SMEs and R&D centres in Europe, BEinGRID has been running 25 Business Experiments designed to implement and deploy Grid solutions across a broad spectrum of European business sectors.

Through this, the largest ICT integrated project financed by the European Commission is highlighting Europe’s priority for ICT research development in order to transform research successes into business opportunities to bolster the European economy.

Project Coordinator Santi Ristol from Atos Origin confirms - “In today’s changing economy, businesses require even more assurance that the solutions presented to them are valid, proven, and practical. Our many innovative end-users - around whom we have developed these solutions across sectors - reinforce that Grid is business-ready, and set a model for related distributed computing uptake, as well.”





BEinGRID has a large presence at ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009 as Platinum Sponsor of the event. This includes a special booth all week long and several workshops and demonstrations throughout the event. BEinGRID experts and delegates from leading commercial, public and research organizations around the world are brought together to share experiences of Grid and Cloud Computing business opportunities, applications and challenges.

As an example, innovative Grid solutions applied to the medical sector through the RadiotherapyGrid Business Experiment of BEinGRID are being promoted. This pilot has developed a solution based on Grid technology and services which helps hospitals plan the best possible treatment for each patient. These improve the efficiency and effectiveness of planned treatments as well as reducing the overall cost of treatment planning. “RadiotherapyGrid will provide us additional information that will allow us to improve radiotherapy treatments’ quality at an affordable cost” says Miguel Pombar Cameán, Medical Physics Department Manager, Santiago de Compostela University Clinical Hospital in Spain.

By highlighting such a scenario, solution and result for each one of the BEinGRID use cases, developing missing software and releasing best practice guides, the project encourages other end users in a similar situation to investigate the role that Grid technology could have for them.





BEinGRID has reached the end of the EC-funded period but this does not mean it is the end of the project. BEinGRID continues through IT-Tude.com which covers the newest and most promising technology and services: Cloud and Grid Computing, Virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS) and more. IT-Tude.com connects emerging ICT research with business solutions, and offers organizations the opportunity to use this new and dynamic online platform for their own outreach.
IT-Tude.com will be bringing your organization online to the forefront of ICT research and business solutions. So stay tuned to www.it-tude.com!





The BEinGRID booklet entitled "Approaching the Cloud: Better Business Using Grid Solutions" summarizes the projects and puts its achievements into interesting perspectives. It can be downloaded from www.beingrid.eu/casestudies.html and ordered free of charge via [e-mail]

Two BEinGRID books published by Springer and written by business consultants also cover the lessons learnt with the 25 BEinGRID Business Experiments:
- "Service Oriented Infrastructures and Cloud Service Platforms for the Enterprise - A selection of common capabilities validated in real-life business trials by the BEinGRID consortium"
- "Grid and Cloud Computing - A Business Perspective on Technology and Applications"

Countries

United Arab Emirates, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom, United States