26 March 2008
The Grid Computing Now! Knowledge Transfer Network is launching a special interest group looking at the issue of software licensing. The group will be launched at a webinar on April 10th that will discuss the challenge that grid computing and virtualisation in general pose to the current software licensing model.
Grid Computing Now! is working closely with FAST, the Federation against Software Theft, to bring insight and understanding to this issue for IT managers in all sectors of the industry.
Speakers at the webinar include:
David Gittins, Capgemini who has been working with the public sector on this challenge
Neil Sanderson, Product Manager for Virtualisation at Microsoft
Mark Cresswell of Scalable Solutions, a leader in the provision of tools for monitoring and reporting usage.
Ian Osborne, Project Director of Grid Computing Now! will chair the session and those attending are invited to an online conference following the broadcast, to discuss the topic and to join the special interest group.
Commenting on the topic, Osborne said: "Virtualisation spread like wildfire through the data centres of UK organisations during 2007. Before virtualisation it was relatively easy to keep control of business IT expenditure through the assigned hardware costs and software applications licensed to execute upon them. Even at the individual level it was possible to keep track of licensing terms and conditions by counting the number of employees who had access to their office and other work applications.Virtualisation changes all of this and we have to ask ourselves two key questions: does virtualisation help or hinder the task of keeping track of licence agreements and their provisions? And, what tools and techniques are available to help us manage in this new age of computing? Our special interest group and the launch webinar will address both of these."
More information on the event is available at: http://mediazone.brighttalk.com/event/gridcomputingnow/fc8001f834-784-intro
The Grid Computing Now! Knowledge Transfer Network is a UK government intervention to stimulate the market adoption of grid computing to increase the UK competitiveness of UK plc.
