Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
17
th
of May 1999) and has at present more than 3 million users that participate with
their PCs.
Inspired by the success of Grid Computing in eScience and driven by current
business and technological developments in companies there is increasing interest
for Grid Computing in industry.
1.2 Business Drivers for Grid Computing in Companies
At present, companies have to survive and develop competitive advantage in a
dynamic and turbulent environment of global competition and rapid business
change. Companies are under constant pressure to simultaneously grow revenue
and market share while reducing costs. To meet these requirements, companies have
been changing and three major trends can be observed that have impact on company
requirements upon Information Technology (IT) support:
• Striving towards high agility,
• Globalization of activities to be able to take advantage of opportunities provided
by a global economy, and
• Increased mobility.
In dynamic business environments agility is considered the key success factor for
companies. Only companies with high agility can be successful in today's rapidly
changing business environments. In literature, there are various definitions for
the term agility: from general ones as for example “
the ability of firms to sense
environmental change and respond readily
” (Overby et al. 2006) to more specific
ones as for example
“...an innovative response to an unpredictable change”
(Wadhwa and Rao 2003). A comprehensive and summarizing definition is given by
van Oosterhout et al. (2007):
“Business agility is the ability to sense highly uncertain external and internal changes, and
respond to them reactively or proactively, based on innovation of the internal operational
processes, involving the customers in exploration and exploitation activities, while
leveraging the capabilities of partners in the business network.”
Business agility is therefore the ability to swiftly and easily change businesses and
business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage
unpredictable external and internal changes.
One basic obstacle for achieving agility is the prevailing IT infrastructure
of enterprises. Despite of efforts to increase flexibility of corporate IT, most
prevailing corporate IT still involves hardwired processes and applications that
cannot be changed quickly and easily. This results in long lead times before the IT
infrastructure can follow and support new business process and product concepts.
Thus, an agile company is only possible with an agile IT infrastructure that can
quickly and efficiently be adjusted to new business ideas. Enterprises would like
to have an IT infrastructure that can realign itself expeditiously to new business
priorities. They require rapid and predictable turnaround times for provisioning
computing power, storage, information, and application flows. Virtualization of
resources (computers and data) and their flexible integration and combination to
