Industry highlights GRIA's value at EGEE-07

Major industrial companies gave a series of presentations during the business track of EGEE-07 showing how GRIA is helping them understand and exploit the benefits of the Grid and Service oriented infrastructures for inter-domain collaboration.  The presentations showed how GRIA's specific focus on industrial requirements ensured that the infrastructure was ideally suited for commercial adoption of Grid technology. Presentations from BAE Systems, Elsag Datamat, MSC Software and NEC all described how GRIA was being used to support extended enterprise collaboration and service provision in different sectors.

BAE systems showed how GRIA's security and management services were used to build a virtual organisation for the collaborative design of aerospace products. The benefits of distributed management services were highlighted ensuring that participating organisations maintain control of resources and members of project engineering teams. Application level provisioning was a seen as a key enabler for collaboration allowing engineers to focus on aerospace design rather than low-level IT resourcing.

Elsag Datamat presented a development for the European Space Agency to deliver a proof-of-concept supporting distributed concurrent engineering design. Key user requirements were security, collaboration and independence between sites with additional technical requirements for interoperability with .NET STEP data exchange services. GRIA was selected because of its support for dynamic trust and security and ability to interoperate with .NET services and client applications. The solution was delivered in a few months and successfully presented to ESA demonstrating the value that service-oriented collaboration can bring to the space industry.

MSC Software presented a development that integrates CAD, CAE and CAT engineering domains by addressing major challenges such as data integration and domain security. Semantic mediation technologies and problem solving environments were integrated with the GRIA OGSA-DAI service to provide secure data mediation layer that can cross-domain boundaries.

NEC presented an industrial strength solution for service provision in the life sciences sector including both large pharma, SMEs and academic service providers. GRIA was deployed to enforce security and quality of service policies that can ensure the protection of intellectual property rights among the different stakeholders.

A final presentation from IT Innovation summarised the barriers to adoption and how GRIA has been developed to specifically address these issues. By focusing on governance policies and the value exchange between businesses, GRIA is now a leading open source infrastructure for inter-domain collaboration within industry and commerce.