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these being driven from the aforementioned most important requirement. The Grid
business enablers are: “Common Use of Resources and Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS)”, “Collaborative and VO” and “Software as a Service (SaaS) and advanced
software architectures” Grid benefits. The actual economic benefits for each one
of those categories stem from one or more of: a) the offering of dynamic resources
using Grid infrastructure, b) services or software that take advantage of the collabo-
ration environment and c) services that are designed or Grid-enabled to be provided
as SaaS. These Grid benefits can be found in the most popular business cases today,
which are presented in the chapter. Each business case is associated with the afore-
mentioned Grid benefits and with the main actors involved that constitute the basic
value chain. Taking into consideration the tangible and/or intangible way an actor
is contributing to the resulting product, a Business Model (BM) is then established
for this actor, in each business case. In particular, Grid services or products are
currently offered according to existing BMs in the market or some adaptations of
them like the Value-added Services, SaaS, SaaP (mainly for Grid middleware) or
the IT-Services BM for offering consultancy services. Also free versions of software
such as Grid middleware can be provided through a Grid BM. The benefits in this
model arise from the additional development of the product from the community and
the contribution of new ideas that can help this to evolve into a more richly featured
product. Thus, economic benefits may be expected from the reputational gain of the
company and economies of scale and scope. Another important BM is the IT-as-a-
Service, where the new products are designed to run in new architectural environ-
ments such as Cloud Computing. Finally, Grid BMs based on existing models such
as the utility computing or the ASP are currently evolving to or integrating HaaS or
IaaS business characteristics and helping to give rise to Cloud Computing.
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