From SOA to Grid Computing: challenging the e-business in SME environments

Abstract

The challenges of the global market have been motivating companies to search how they can improve their competitiveness through partnership. Industrial organizations are willing to establish them through the Internet, creating industrial networked environments and providing new ways of work and to make business. One of the principal challenges offered is the opportunity to use the network to search for new resources, and select those according specific business criteria, e.g., price, localization, availability, etc. However, and especially for SME companies, the lack of know-how has been preventing them to move ahead in that direction. This paper, after describe the problem and motivations, proposes a standard-based low-cost platform to dynamically incorporate and manage furniture manufacture companies in a collaborative environment for networked management of manufacturing resources. Its architecture embraces Grid Computing, Web-Services and the standard ISO10303-236 Application Protocol technology, and it has been validated by industry through industrial pilots in the scope of the IMS SMART-fm, and European ATHENA (IP) INTEROP (NOE) projects, aiming to be a reference for SMEs in Europe, Canada, Australia and United States.