EGEE, the Enabling Grids for E-ScienceE project, today announced collaborations with three new Business Associates-- Avanade, Excelian and Hitachi-reflecting the increasing significance of grid technology in the commercial sector. The EGEE Business Associate (EBA) programme offers industry partners opportunities to engage in mutually beneficial technical work, such as co-ordinated technical developments, market surveys, exploitation strategies, and knowledge transfer between enterprise and the project. "EGEE has much to offer to business," says Project Director, Dr. Bob Jones. "The EBA programme is an important component in our strategy for the spin-off of EGEE technologies into business and industry, providing a framework in which companies can confidently move ahead with the adoption of Grid technologies." Avanade, a global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth, is excited to join the EGEE Business Associate programme. "Thanks to this collaboration, EGEE will leverage Avanade expertise on .Net technologies to fully support gLite on Windows machines, a critical factor for any enterprise ready software," said Raffaele Sgherri, Principal Consultant at Avanade. "Avanade's adoption of the gLite middleware will increase visibility of gLite on real case mission-critical projects outside the academic environment and will build a strong partnership with a global consultancy company that will promote gLite and help EGEE to further enhance it." "We are keen to work with EGEE," said Adam Vile of Excelian. "We are looking forward to helping to shape the infrastructure by bringing the problems facing businesses today to EGEE and in turn making the product and the community more relevant to current business needs. We will be able to capitalise on the research and experience of the EGEE community while helping the project look for new opportunities to grow and develop valuable tools and skills." Alessandro Bassi said Hitachi's Sophia Antipolis Laboratory (HSAL) was also looking forward to working with EGEE. "We are thrilled to start this collaboration with EGEE," he said. "By having the possibility of integrating our data grid solution with the EGEE framework, we will be able to contribute to the scientific community and bring in a much-needed mechanism for handling huge quantities of data. In return, we will be able to talk directly with people and organisations dealing every day with such quantities of data, and learn from their direct experience." The HSAL team recently incorporated the former Hitachi Cambridge Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), which has already completed a number of research projects related to security, network software NGN and Data Grids. As an EGEE Business Associate, companies can influence the programme of industrial events, as well as help define a sustainable infrastructure to follow EGEE. EGEE Business Associates work with EGEE to make the distributed computing infrastructure of the Grid more user-friendly, effective and secure in an industrial context. Existing EGEE Business Associates include GridwiseTech, NICE and Platform Computing. GridwiseTech works with EGEE on joint dissemination to the commercial sector to help increase adoption, especially of EGEE technologies. NICE aims to ensure that its GENIUS Grid portal and EnginFrame Framework are compatible with EGEE's gLite middleware. Platform's collaboration with EGEE has focused on the interface between gLite and LSF so that resources can be better exploited, leading to further developments in Grid.