Concept of market-based grid computing

The concept of our product is to connect the idle computing power in broadband-enabled computers to the computing needs of individuals, organizations and enterprises by establishing a open source trading platform based on commodity market principles for computing power. By standardizing, monetizing and commoditizing computing power, we create avenues for users and organizations to contribute their idle, high-quality and cost-effective computing power to individuals, enterprises and organizations, resulting in greater utilization of computing power across the World Wide Web.

Market:

Trends: Grid computing is gaining governmental and institutional support, with the largest number of international grid projects spreading throughout Europe like A-WARE. Within the U.S., however, the largest commercial success stems from established tech companies like Oracle and Intel, who are selling computing power directly to individual enterprises. The creation of a unified grid computing market has only begun with Parabon, a Virginia-based company that has little B2B reach beyond its company headquarters. NASA, Fermi Lab and related large governmental agencies are expected to be the most fervent advocates for a grid standard, unless small businesses begin to demand unified grid computing applications.

Customer - The growing importance for computing power intensive computer simulations for small enterprises have brought in the need for on-demand, cost-effective computing power. Market-based grid computing targets price sensitive customers who need computing power but are unwilling to invest the huge amount of maintenance and installation costs.

Competition - The largest players in the market for grid computing solutions are Sun, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft , companies which leverage off sophisticated data centers and huge, existing computing capabilities. New competitors include Parabon and Univa UD, founded in 1999 and 2004, respectively. These companies compete on a new model of open source grid computing solutions and unbeatable price-performance. Market shares and sales of both companies are increasing due to their reliability and proven technologies in the developing supplier market for open source grid computing solutions.

Seizing the Opportunity:

Partners – OGC hopes to work with current major non-profits to port their individual open grid projects on to one based on the Globus environment. Through this, OGC would be able to mass up a huge amount of customers which would give them a good head start in acquiring more computing power contributors. Also we plan to partner with high user based applications like itunes and Facebook to reach the optimum of customers in the shortest time.

Business Model - OGC runs on a subscription based business model. The individual users or corporations that provide computing power are paid on an hourly basis taking into account the quality of that computing power as well. Subscription and usage based payments are collected from customers who wish to use the computing power on an hourly basis. Additionally, OGC also provides consultancy services for middleware development and maintains this as a secondary revenue stream.

Risk – One of the major risks involved in pursuing this opportunity will be that enterprises might not be too receptive to adopting our open source platform due to security issues involved in spreading their workload. In addition, since we are using a end user computing power distribution, therefore we will not be able to guarantee an amount of processing power unless we mass up enough users from the head start which might discourage a lot of early adopters in the industry.

Questions:

We are diagnosing some of the largest enterprise technology issues that companies face: functionality, scalability, flexibility, and ease of access. We want to spread the momentum that the A-WARE project has brought to individual enterprises in Europe, to encompass entire geographical regions in the U.S. Our biggest concern is seeking the strategic alliances that would most quickly scale our commoditization of grid computing.