EGEE'08 Business Track

The EGEE’08 Business Track, 22-23 September 2008 in Istanbul Turkey, is the third in a successful series of dedicated sessions designed to bring the benefits of grid and related technologies to the attention of businesses that have not yet looked at these for their innovation. The various sessions will address areas of interest to the international business community, exploring trends in distributed computing as we move towards new frontiers. Talks will showcase adoption success stories, new developments and trends across a range of commercial sectors.

The increasing interest surrounding cloud computing, and its relation to grids, makes the Business Track and a conference keynote especially timely. On Wednesday, 24 September, Peter Vosshall, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon.com will present "Web Scale Computing: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service". The Business Track Session on clouds & grids will explore the sea-change surrounding cloud computing and how it fits in the bigger grid picture. The Business Track also features sessions dedicated to Data Management & Virtualization; Modelling & Simulation; and Grid Economics & Business Models.

The Business Track will connect grid experts, end users and IT innovators to explore new opportunities for the adoption of distributed computing by engaging with EGEE through set processes designed to promote industrial involvement and collaborative developments.

The Business Track offers an important opportunity to gain new knowledge on:

• The benefits to be gained from the shift towards low-cost virtualization from both a developer's and use case perspective.
• The potential of modelling & simulation across a range of commercial sectors, with examples of how grids are enhancing real-time simulations from both European and international perspectives.
• The current and future development and deployment of grids through new business models and best practices with particular reference to SMEs.

The concluding interactive panel discussion within the Business Track will offer an overview of the EGI (http://web.eu-egi.eu/) Blueprint in relation to industry, as well as highlight best practices and key milestones as we move towards a new frontier in distributing computing.

 

 

Business Track Speakers Profiles

 

Stephen Adams, Linalis, Switzerland

Stephen has worked in high level roles in large MNC's developing and implementing strategies that increase stakeholder value. He has also worked as a business development manager within small and large organisations for over 5 years. He is now the Managing Director of Linalis, having successfully helped increase the profitability in his business development role. Linalis is a specialist provider of open source system integration and training.

Primary focus is on Open Source system & network administration, performance management and reporting (Business Intelligence), Contact relationship management (CRM), Enterprise Document Management (ECM, EDM) and Knowledge Management, Content Management Solutions (CMS), GroupWare and telecommunications (VOIP). Stephen has extensive experience as a senior finance professional himself with a wide range of commercial skills and business exposure.

 

Shimon Agassi, IBM-Haifa, Israel

Shimon Agassi is an IBM Certified IT Consultant, and has been working in the IBM Haifa Research Labs for the last two years. As a Research Staff Member, Shimon's activities are focused on requirements definition and service tools development in the areas of Virtualization and long-term Digital Preservation. During previous years, Shimon worked in the IBM Global Services organization, delivering consulting services for Government, Finance, Insurance, Manufacturing, Telco and Hi-Tech IBM customers in the areas of Business Continuity and IT Optimization.

 

Avner Algom, IGT, Israel

Avner Algom has more than 20 years of professional experience in management of Hi-Tech companies, business development and marketing in Israel, US, Europe and the Far East. For the last 4 years, Mr. Algom is managing the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT) _www.grid.org.il_ <file://www.grid.org.il> - The IGT is a non-profit organization of leading vendors, ISVs, customers and academia, focused on knowledge sharing and networking for developing Enterprise Grid, Virtualization and Cloud Computing solutions. It is open, independent and vendor-neutral. The IGT creates business and technologies opportunities by providing frameworks of conferences, work groups, training, a Grid lab and a WEB knowledge center for business and technology networking. The IGT is also an affiliate of the OGF.

 

Chris Bannink, Logica Management Consulting

Chris Bannick (1967) is Principal Consultant at Logica Management Consulting with broad experience in marketing and business development for different a-brands. He is thought leader on new-commerce and new media innovations. He was speaker on several international seminars on topics related to mobile, trend watching, innovation and grid computing. He is currently work package leader in the GridEcon project about the economic and business modelling of grid computing.

 

Roberto Barbera, Cometa, Italy

Prof. Roberto Barbera was born in Catania (Italy) in October 1963. He graduated in Physics "cum laude" at the University of Catania in 1986 and since 1990 he holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the same University. Since beginning of 2005 he is Associated Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Catania University. Since his graduation his main research activity has been done in the realm of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics. He has been involved in many experiments in France, Russia, United States and Sweden to study nuclear matter properties in heavy ion collisions at intermediate energies. He is author of more than 70 scientific papers published on international journals and more than 100 proceedings of international conferences. He is also referee of Journal of Grid Computing and Future Generation Computer Systems.

Since 1997 he is involved in the NA57 Experiment at CERN SPS and in the ALICE Experiment at CERN LHC. Within ALICE, he has been the coordinator of the Off-line software of the Inner Tracking System detector and member of the Off-line Board. Since late 1999 he is interested in Grid Computing. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Italian INFN Grid Project (http://grid.infn.it) and holds the coordination of the dissemination and training activities. At Italian level, he is also the Director of two big Grid Projects (TriGrid VL, www.trigrid.it, and PI2S2, www.pi2s2.it) funded by the Sicilian Regional Government and by the Ministry of University and Research, respectively. At European level, he is the Technical Coordinator of the EC funded EELA (http://www.eu-eela.eu) and EUMEDGRID (http://www.eumedgrid.eu) Projects and has several responsibilities in other EC Grid Projects such as EGEE-II (http://www.eu-egee.org), EUChinaGRID (http://www.euchinagrid.org), EU-IndiaGrid (http://www.euindiagrid.eu), and ICEAGE (http://www.iceage-eu.org).

Since 2002 he is the responsible of the GENIUS grid portal project (https://genius.ct.infn.it) and, in 2004, he created the international GILDA grid infrastructure (https://gilda.ct.infn.it) for training and dissemination that he coordinates since the beginning.

 

Marc-Elian Bégin, Six², Switzerland

Following Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering studies, Marc-Elian worked from 1994 to 2004 in industry in the space domain for customers such as the Canadian and European Space Agencies, as well as the Canadian and European Space industries. He specialized in real-time system simulators and test-bed development and contributed to the delivery of no less than a dozen systems.

Moving on from the space field in 2004, he joined CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva) in the Grid Computing group on the EGEE project (the largest public grid infrastructure project). In 2006 he joined the CERN team leading the ETICS project, which provides automated build and test services for managing complex software, using on grid technology.

In the summer of 2007, Marc-Elian co-created Six², a company based in Geneva, which develops build, test and integration services for distributed software systems, and offers agile software development services and consultancy.

 

Charles Brett, Forrester

Charles serves Application Development & Program Management professionals. He is a leading analyst in complex software, including high-end transaction computing and software infrastructure, complex event processing, and other infrastructure related to event processing. In addition to this research, Charles covers middleware for application integration, and he is actively involved with issues of automated application discovery and software inventory management.

Charles joined Forrester in 2007. Before this he ran his own consulting business for 20+ years and was the editorial director of the SAA Spectrum and then the MIDDLEWARESPECTRA journal. He has 25 years of hands-on experience with IT, working with international companies in Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, California, and New York (where he focused on communications, telecommunications, and the financial sector). Charles has spoken at numerous industry conferences around the world, has written for numerous publications (including The Financial Times), and was the general chair in 2005 of the biannual High Performance Systems Workshop. He is the author of Making the Ends Meet, The 5 Axes of Business Application Integration, and, most recently, he edited Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): Analyses and Commentaries.

 

Stefano Cozzini, Democritos, Italy

Stefano Cozzini is a Developing Scientist of CNR/INFM working at National Simulation

Center DEMOCRITOS hosted at Sissa (Trieste, Italy). He is presently technical director of SISSA/eLab, a joint SISSA/Democritos laboratory for e-science, which coordinates and maintains all the HPC and Grid resources of the two institutions. He is also external consultant for cluster and grid computing at ICTP (International Center of Theoretical Physics). He recently coordinated the Italian EGRID project and is now technical coordinator of the EU-IndiaGrid project. His main professional interests are in the field of High Performance Computing and Grid Computing applied to computational physics.

 

Marco Di Girolamo, HP, Italy

Graduated in Electronics Engineering summa cum laude in November 1986. He has more than 20 years of working experience in R&D, IT and Consulting environments, in different Companies, both Italian and international.

He started his professional career as R&D engineer, dealing with ECCM-capable radio mobile systems for homeland security. Then he moved to automation, focusing on remote control of environmental plants, monitoring networks and building automation.

In Hewlett-Packard since 1993, he covered positions as R&D Engineer in hardcopy systems, mainly network-connected scanners and digital senders. In 2000, he moved to HP Italy Innovation Center, initially serving as senior solution architect and project manager in different engagements, both internal and external, mainly in IP services management and mobile applications segments.

Since 2002, he is leading HP Italy activities within European collaborative research and innovation initiatives, encompassing more than 20 projects across IST-FP5, IST-FP6, eContent, FP7 (ICT and Security), CIP. Among others, he contributed to the NextGRID Integrated Project (http://www.nextgrid.org/) that developed architecture for Next Generation Grids aimed at fostering GRID's widespread use by research, industry and ordinary citizens. He is currently part of HP's team working in the GridTrust project.

 

Kalle Happonen, HIP-TEK, Finland

Kalle Happonen started his involvement with grid technologies in 2004 while working for Helsinki Institute of Physics at CERN in 2004. He has stayed with the Technology Programme of Helsinki Institute of Physics (HIP-TEK) ever since. HIP-TEK's mission is to facilitate technology transfer between academia and business, with a focus on CERN.

After graduating from Arcada Polytechnic in 2005, Kalle Happonen has been working with several national and international grid projects including the Finnish M-grid, EGEE and Finland's contribution to LHC Computing Grid. His main focuses have been security, virtualization, interoperability and applyng them to grid environments. Since the spring 2008 he has been working on the EGEE-III prjoject at CERN.

 

Damien Hubaux, CERIC, Belgium

Mr. Damien Hubaux is heading the Software & Service Technologies department at CETIC (Center of Excellence in Information and Communication Technologies), located in Charleroi, Belgium. He is managing research activities in the domain of Grid technologies and SOA, semantics, and open source software. He is involved in consultancy and technology transfer related to these domains towards the industry. In the BEinGRID FP6 project, he coordinates the 18 "business experiments" of the first wave, and supports the management of the second wave of 7 experiments.

 

Jochen Krebs, Altair, Germany

Jochen has a diploma in Physics from Munich University and in 1979 a doctorate in Astrophysics at Max-Planck Institute, Garching. From 1979-1982 he held various consultant and management positions at CRAY Research, Digital Equipment Corp. and Compaq. In 2003 - 2004 was a member of the Executive Board, Partec AG, Munich. Since 2005 Jochen has been a Business Development Manager for Enterprise Computing at Altair Engineering GmbH, Germany.

 

Erwin Laure, EGEE, Switzerland

Dr. Erwin Laure is the Technical Director of the EU funded project "Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe (EGEE)" working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). After joining CERN in 2002 he worked on data management issues within the EU DataGrid (EDG) project, became the Technical Coordinator of EDG, and coordinated the middleware re-engineering activities in the first phase of EGEE. He holds a PhD in Business Administration and Computer Science from the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests include grid computing with a focus on data management in grid environments as well as programming environments, languages, compilers and runtime systems for parallel and distributed computing.

 

Antonio Puliafito, University of Messina, Italy

Antonio Puliafito is a full professor of computer engineering at the University of Messina, Italy. His interests include parallel and distributed systems, networking, wireless and GRID computing. During 1994-1995 he spent 12 months as visiting professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Duke University, North Carolina - USA, where he was involved in research on advanced analytical modelling techniques. He is the coordinator of the Ph.D. course in Advanced Technologies for Information Engineering currently available at the University of Messina and the responsible for the course of study in computers engineering. He was a referee for the European Community for the projects of the fourth, fifth and sixth Framework Program and he is currently acting as a referee also in the seventh FP. He has contributed to the development of the software tools WebSPN, MAP and ArgoPerformance, which are being used both at national and international level. Dr. Puliafito is co-author (with R. Sahner and Kishor S. Trivedi) of the text entitled "Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems: An Example-Based Approach Using the SHARPE Software Package", edited by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He is currently the director of the RFIDLab, a joint research lab with Oracle and Intel on RFID and wireless, the director of the Centre on Information Technologies Development and Their Applications (CIA), the vice-president of the Consorzio Cometa whose aim is to enhance and exploit high performance computing. From 2006 to 2008 he acted as the technical director of the Project 901, aiming at creating a wireless/wired communication infrastructure inside the University of Messina to support new value added services. He is also the responsible for the University of Messina of two big Grid Projects (TriGrid VL, www.trigrid.it, and PI2S2, www.pi2s2.it) funded by the Sicilian Regional Government and by the Ministry of University and Research, respectively. He is currently a member of the general assembly and of the technical committee of the Reservoir project, an IP project funded from the European Commission under the seventh FP to explore the deployment and management of IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. He is the technical director of Inquadro s.r.l., a spin-off company of the University of Messina whose main business is RFID and its application both in public and private sectors.

 

Luca Regini, Avanade, Italy

Luca Regini is an Associate Principal Consultant and member of CTO team at Avanade Italy. He is one of the main developers of Avanade's Grid asset. Following his experience of both Microsoft and Unix technology he is currently working on the creation of integration and middleware solutions for one major bank in Italy. He holds a PhD in Computer Science.

 

Bernhard Schott, Platform, Germany

Bernhard Schott is the EU-Research Program Manager at Platform Computing and has a diploma degree in physics from University Frankfurt. 20 years of focus and work on distributed systems: from nano-second signal distribution over real-time data distribution to distributed Enterprise Service Architectures. Since 2000 with Platform Computing specialized on HPC data center and Grid technologies. As Program Manager EU-Research for Platform Computing in charge of liaison and collaboration with research and academia Europe wide.

 

David Sinclair, Imense Ltd., UK

Born in Scotland in the dark ages before colour TV or the Internet he more or less learned to read and write before going to Edinburgh University to study Mathematical Physics. A short stint in military research convinced him that a D.Phil in Computer Vision at the oasis of Oxford University was the right way forwards. A series of postdoctoral research positions (in Computer Vision) in 3 of Europe's less fashionable cities followed.

In 1997 he made the transition to commercial research working for the AT&T Cambridge Research Laboratory, leading the multimedia information retrieval project. This project saw the birth of the first 'Ontological Query Language' for visual search. The entrepreneurial atmosphere created there by Professor Andy Hopper proved a great influence.

In 2004 Dr Sinclair founded Cambridge Ontology (now called Imense Ltd) along with Dr Christopher Town. The company was successful in building commercially viable content based image retrieval technology and in raising finance from grants and angle investors. Through a series of grants from the STFC Imense has been able to demonstrate the application of its technology to Internet scale collections of images. The technology now has commercial customers.

Dr Sinclair retains a wide interest in object recognition techniques from computer vision and ontological methods for knowledge representation.

 

Nick Trigg, Constellation Technologies, UK

Nick Trigg is the CEO of Constellation Technologies Ltd. He was Head of Business Development for STFC managing spin-outs at the Technology Transfer office of the STFC based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Previously he has worked for Schlumberger Wireline in Africa, a Venture Capital investment firm, a Business Development Director at a Bookham Technology, a high technology early stage company.

He has an engineering degree from Oxford University, a MBA from INSEAD and is C.Dip AF (ACCA).

 

Gael Youinou, CGGVeritas, France