GRIA – Grid Middleware Successfully Deployed in BEinGRID for Finance and Tourism

BEinGRID, as the project driving the implementation and deployment of Grid solutions in industry, could not miss this event. One of the solutions highlighted at DIGIBIZ is GRIA: the Grid middleware used in many of BEinGRID's most successful pilot projects.

DIGIBIZ 2009 is the key international conference where industry and academia focus on innovative e-business and e-commerce technologies for the Future Internet. BEinGRID, as the project driving the implementation and deployment of Grid solutions in industry, could not miss this event. One of the solutions highlighted at DIGIBIZ is GRIA: the Grid middleware used in many of BEinGRID's most successful pilot projects.

GRIA and BEinGRID

In BEinGRID, GRIA is the foundation middleware used in five business experiments covering the retail and logistics, advanced manufacturing, financial and tourism sectors. GRIA has been integral in solving the B2B integration and management issues in this broad range of sectors, demonstrating its readiness for business use.

GRIA in TravelCRM for Tourism

To face the competition, small independent travel agencies must offer high-value personalized travel services for their customers at competitive prices. For that, they must analyze their customer data through Business Intelligence processing. The BEinGRID TravelCRM pilot project uses a software as a service model to pool data from groups of travel agencies in order to generate enough information for useful Business Intelligence analysis. The travel agencies in turn receive reports to improve their sales and marketing. GRIA provides the technology to link the distributed databases and portals in a secure and managed fashion, using service level agreements to monitor and manage the system.

According to Santiago Piña from the Viajes Sta Ponsa travel agency, “With TravelCRM, we foresee a tool that will help us manage the data from our clients and providers, converting it into a valuable knowledge bank for us. This tool will definitely help our travel group improve our modus operandi for our members' benefit, linking knowledge of our data. In this case, 1+1 is more than 2.”

The TravelCRM pilot is demonstrated at the DIGIBIZ conference.

GRIA in AMONG for Finance

More than $1 trillion of dirty money is laundered worldwide each year. To hide the trail of money laundering, criminals split money between many financial institutions. Current anti-money laundering (AML) products are inefficient as they operate in isolated banking environments and provide no collaboration between banks. However, recent changes in EU law permit a limited amount of information exchange. The AMONG Business Experiment from BEinGRID provides the first solution in which banks can cooperate with each other, exchanging some customer information to improve their customer risk assessments. In AMONG, GRIA has been integrated with existing AML software and provides a secure channel managed using service level agreements to exchange this highly sensitive data.

“AMONG takes the next step in providing a holistic viewpoint of money-laundering activity, and most surprisingly at low cost, securely and regardless of the AML application installed in the bank” says Piraeus Group Chief Compliance Officer.

Learn more about GRIA in BEinGRID

If you are interested in learning more about the GRIA middleware used in the BEinGRID Business Experiments, you can view the BEinGRID demonstrator 'Grid Computer Aided Engineering' (GridCAE) on www.beingrid.eu. It describes how ICON, a CAE consultancy company, enhanced and extended its client offering by using GRIA to access remote compute resources. More information is also available on www.gridipedia.eu

About BEinGRID

Type of project: Integrated Project
Project coordinator: Santi Ristol, ATOS ORIGIN
Project start date: June 1, 2006
Duration: 42 months
Budget: 24.8 million Euros
EC contribution: 15.7 million Euros
Further information on BEinGRID can be found at www.beingrid.eu and www.gridipedia.eu
For more information, please contact: Bérengère Fally
+32 (0) 71 919807
beingrid@cetic.be
About GRIA
GRIA is a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) developed and maintained by IT Innovation and designed to support B2B collaborations through service provision across organizational boundaries in a secure, interoperable and flexible manner.

GRIA makes use of business models, processes and semantics to allow resource owners and users to discover each other and negotiate terms for access to high-value resources. By focusing on business processes and the associated semantics, GRIA enables users to provision for their computational needs more cost effectively, and develop new business models for some of their services.