ACADEMIA

September 1 NEC will establish the "Grid Promotion Center" to promote the development of new middleware products for grid computing systems. NEC's grid computing technologies have been used in scientific research. The company wants to further expand the applications of these technologies to include enterprise mission critical applications by reflecting the results of studies to be conducted by the new center to its VALUMO WARE software product series. NEC is aiming for a 30% share of Japan's grid computing market by 2008, which the company expects to swell 25 times to approximately 500 billion yen ($4.59 bil) by then.