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to increased cost-efficiency for the infrastructure deployed. This is particularly
important for a large organization with several departments scattered around the
world, each possessing their own computing infrastructure. Connecting these via
a Grid can generate significant enhancements, a higher exploitation of resources,
cost-efficiency and economies of scale, due to the fact that the interconnection of
all machines, improves the utilization of each one (Thanos et al. 2007).
2. The
“Collaborative and VO”
business enabler: economic benefits are expected
by offering services or software that take advantage of the collaborative environ-
ment and functionalities that Grid can offer in a VO context. Consider a group
of organizations, each of which possesses its own resources, which are comple-
mentary to each other. For example, organization A possesses a powerful data-
base server, while B has a huge amount of data and C possesses an application
running over its server that requires data such as that of B. Clearly, when col-
laborating in the form of Grid, all organizations can bring together a powerful
outcome, while each of them exploits its own resources in a cost-efficient way,
without needing to invest in the missing resources that are now contributed by
others. In this case, the collaborating organizations enjoy economies of scope,
since bringing all their resources together by means of Grid broadens their scope
of applicability (Thanos et al. 2007).
3. The
“Software as a Service (SaaS) and advanced software architectures”
busi-
ness enabler: economic benefits are expected by Grid-enabling existing serv-
ices in order to offer them using the SaaS delivery paradigm or developing new
Grid services, designed to be provided using the SaaS. Here, by the term “grid-
enabling” we mean the redesigning of an existing application in order for it to
be offered in a Grid environment. Also this category accounts for the cases that
Grid services are offered (via SaaS) with the purpose of being integrated to SOA
and Cloud Computing architectures. A SaaS version of an application is more
affordable to infrequent users of that application, who now have a benefit com-
pared to investing on the corresponding software license and/or computational
infrastructure. Therefore, both these users and the service provider gain, because
this version increases the demand for the service by making it affordable at lower
costs (Thanos et al. 2007).
In the next sections we will discuss with examples how these 3 enablers can be
spotted today in the market and how they can lead to building a successful business
model.
5.4 Popular Business Cases in the Market Today and Associated
Benefits
After defining the 3 aforementioned categories as enablers for doing business with
Grid we will now examine how these can be found in the most popular business
cases in the market today. These are categorised and presented in the next table.
