Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
for Grid services; and explain the relationship to a BM and business plan. Next, we
present the different business cases that can be found in the market today and link
them to associated BMs. Finally, a more detailed analysis of particular cases for the
market today is presented.
5.2 Setting the Scene
Grid technology promises a new way of delivering services across IP-based infra-
structures. These services range from common ones, such as existing mass multi-
media services, to more complex and demanding customised industrial applica-
tions. The start-up and key drivers behind the adoption of Grid by industry has
been the performance advantage this technology promises to deliver, that in busi-
ness and economic terms is translated into reducing costs, simplifying local infra-
structure and speeding up processes. Under rapidly changing IT technologies and
the pressure of highly-competitive global markets, the importance of these drivers
is particularly high. Besides the aforementioned advantages, the Grid can be even
considered as a “Green-IT” technology. Indeed, IT resources can be distributed over
the world and be utilised dynamically and interchangeably based on climate and
environmental conditions (e.g. by “chase the moon” (Berry 2007)), to minimise the
energy consumption and consequently the associated costs.
The notion of Grid and its associated technological and business advantages
has further evolved during recent years and the underpinning performance enabler
advantage has been complemented by the collaborative benefits of this new tech-
nology. The early business models related to Grid have been based on either
computing utility provisioning or on software products supported via in-house high-
performance Grid facilities. The former case, i.e. the use of computing power as
utility, is not a new idea; and some even argue that is actually a backwards move
to the past in terms of mainframe and terminal architecture. This approach prom-
ises to satisfy (via cost-effective means) the continuously increasing need for more
computing resources and scalability by industries, not previously belonging to the
IT centric domain. Despite the fact that the core idea, that computing resources
should be offered in the future as a utility (like the electrical power Grids), was
broad enough to cover the single home user, this was later abandoned. Eventually,
the market clearly showed that the target market should be the research institutions
and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), i.e. organisation that had intermittent
need for high power computing resources
The case of software services provided to customers through in-house Grid-
facilities was soon demarcated as two correlated very promising business cases.
First, the
Application Service Provisioning
(ASP) one, where a provider hosts, oper-
ates and supports applications for his clients in a Grid-powered infrastructure. The
aim was to relieve them from maintenance costs and offer them scalability, agility
and reliability together with high performance. The second business case was based
on the provision of services according to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) para-
digm. In this scenario, the service is hosted for the provider (which can be an SME)
