This week GridwiseTech, the independent Grid experts, joined the Enabling Grid for E sciencE (EGEE) Business Associate programme, building on the longstanding relationship between GridwiseTech and EGEE. Together, GridwiseTech and EGEE will work on joint promotion to the business community to highlight the potential of Grid technology as a solution for today's IT problems. The announcement coincides with GridwiseTech Business Workshop, taking place in Krakow, Poland on 22-23 February 2007, which brings together cross-segment Grid experts, users and vendors and financial sector decision makers. An EGEE industry day held on the 23rd February in Budapest, Hungary approaches the uptake of grid technology from the angle of SMEs. "We have long experience in consulting with industrial customers and working with large scale resources," commented GridwiseTech president Pawel Plaszczak, "our work with EGEE has always been very exciting, and we feel that joining the programme is an ideal way to strengthen it. Such cooperation also helps bring together the academic and commercial Grid opportunities, for the benefit of the Grid community as a whole." EGEE, a large-scale Grid project co-funded by the European Commission, operates a computing infrastructure of hundreds of sites in more than 40 countries in support of the global scientific community that processes up to 50,000 jobs per day. Working with nine different scientific domains and more than 200 distinct research groups (organised into Virtual Organisations), EGEE is the world's largest multidisciplinary Grid infrastructure. The project's Business Associate programme is a framework for collaborative work in many areas between the EGEE project and the business community. GridwiseTech has worked with EGEE since 2005 on a range of subjects, including producing a universal, application-level business portal to the EGEE infrastructure. GridwiseTech has also integrated the job management environments of large industrial customers with the EGEE compute resources, allowing companies to use external processing to meet peak demands for their advanced applications. "We're very happy to welcome GridwiseTech as a Business Associate," said Bob Jones, Director of EGEE. "The programme helps us ensure the results of our project are passed on to the commercial sector. Our discussions with GridwiseTech and the other Business Associates also lead directly into our development plans, as they provide valuable perspectives on our work." Through the Business Associate Programme, EGEE will benefit from GridwiseTech's advice on engagement of the businesses community and will benefit from GridwiseTech's experience in integrating the proprietary systems of its customers with EGEE's Grid. In return, GridwiseTech will gain valuable access to the rapidly growing research community using Grids, as well as the unique knowledge base built up by EGEE in the construction of its large-scale infrastructure. This knowledge will feed into GridwiseTech's strong portfolio of products and services. GridwiseTech provides vendor-independent consulting and comprehensive technical assistance in designing and building Grid architectures. The market has a number of commercial and open-source Grid, virtualization and SOA solutions. GridwiseTech provides independent assistance in choosing the right one. With major corporate customers in US, Europe and Japan, GridwiseTech also specializes in Grid middleware integration (Sun Grid Engine, Platform LSF, Moab etc.) with Web portal development.