What is Business Grids

Over the past years we have witnessed a shift in the market towards service orientation. Companies in the coming service market need to be extremely agile. This agility is needed at all levels from business to low level ICT in order to reflect the changes in business needs. Particularly, at application level the adoption of the SOA paradigm is already a reality. Software frameworks allowing creation, composition and orchestration of business processes enabling intra and inter collaborations are already available. Obviously, this has given a boost towards the widespread adoption of this approach. Old software vendors have service-enabled their offers, while new opportunities have been filled by new players and more will come in the future. On the other hand, at infrastructure level agility needs to be enforced. However, the infrastructure on which this market has grown so far is not able to fully leverage its potential. Business Grids are envisaged to become the infrastructure backbone for the future of ICT. This will have a relevant impact on the economy and will give support for the emergence of new services and applications. Composition and orchestration of resources is already offered by Grid, although towards more science-oriented goals. Specifically, high performance computing resources are shared among Grid participants, mainly executing stateless batch jobs. As opposite, Business Grids aim to provide support for general business applications, usually multi-tier solutions made of application servers and databases. Data consistency in business transactions is fundamental. This chapter discusses the role of Business Grids in the coming service market, analyzing relevant scenarios and providing a roadmap towards full development and adoption of this technology within the commercial arena. (See appendix for acronym guide).