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13 Organizational and Governance Challenges for
Grid Computing in Companies - Summary of Findings
from Business Experiments
Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, Thomas Wozniak
13.1 Introduction
Grid computing originated in eScience where it is applied to support scientific tasks
requiring high performance computing and collaborative scientific efforts. The
Business Experiments presented in chapters 9 to 12 and the remaining 21 experiments
of the BEinGRID project (BEinGRID Booklet 2009) demonstrated the applicability
of Grid computing in business environments and provided an outlook towards the
application of Cloud computing in companies.
Besides illustrating and testing technical Grid innovations and developments
specifically dedicated to business usage of Grids, services and an outlook to Cloud
computing, the Business Experiments provided an insight of the potential benefits
and challenges of these technologies for business purposes. One benefit of Grid
computing for companies is enabling high performance computing (HPC) either
through access to external HPC resources or through creating internal Grids based
on existing company computing resources. The access to HPC enables significant
acceleration of business tasks that require high computing power. Such tasks are
mainly simulation tasks as part of product development, design and engineering
activities or other tasks as treatment or risk calculation in health and financial organ-
izations respectively.
Another benefit of Grid computing for business purposes is the support for effi-
cient inter- and intra-company collaboration by enabling both the establishment
of virtual organizations (VO) and the sharing of resources and data within them.
Application areas for Grid-enabled VO are for example collaborations within
supply chains, inter-company collaborative engineering or common offerings within
complex online sites.
Based on the results from the Business Experiments, it became evident that
companies can benefit from Grid computing not only by enabling savings on infra-
structure costs. Grid computing also allows companies to create new value and to
achieve competitive advantage.
As Fellows and Barr (2007) from the market research company “The 451
Group” state it: “Grids are evolving beyond high-performance computing (HPC)
and compute tasks in order to support broader organizing principles driving enter-
prise IT evolution”. Faster and more accurate product design for example lowers
time-to-market and strengthens the innovation capabilities and competitiveness
of companies. Similar effects are achieved through the ability to quickly establish
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