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Webinar: The business case for next generation IT architecture

Last week we recorded and broadcast another Grid Computing Now! webinar. This featured Steve Wallage of The 451 Group and Shahid Mohammed of Marsh talking about the business case for Grid. Steve presented a distillation of the 451 Group's findings from talking to Grid users across a wide range of sectors. Shahid then gave us the benefit of his experience applying Grid in an e-commerce business. Both are good presenters and I recommend their talks.

You can see the webinar at http://brighttalk.com/comm/gridcomputingnow/3b03d97eee-2473-632-2319. This uses Flash and so should be compatible with most browsers.

Viewers submitted a good range of questions. A couple of people asked about the type of businesses - small, medium or large; finance, pharma or other - that can benefit from Grid. Shahid's talk demonstrated that reasonably small firms in a general commercial sector can benefit. Another question focussed on security. Both Steve and Shahid explained that Grid can be deployed within the enterprise, which can greatly reduce concerns about security.

We didn't discuss the definition of Grid - there are people who would maintain that an infrastructure deployed entirely within one organisation "isn't really Grid". As always at Grid Computing Now!, we are less interested in what the technology should be called than in what it can do for UK businesses. It is clear from these talks that the combination of virtualisation, dynamic resource allocation and service-oriented deployment can achieve significant business gains - and that is what matters most.

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