EGA says it is an open, independent and vendor-neutral community addressing the near-term requirements for deploying commercial applications in a Grid computing environment. Initial focus areas include reference models, provisioning, security and accounting.

EGA will address obstacles that organizations face using enterprise Grids. It will exclusively focus on the needs of enterprise users.

In addition to providing an open forum for enterprise software, hardware, service companies and end users, EGA is working with other consortia and standards organizations.

In a response to the formation of EGA, the Global Grid Forum (GGF) does not sound too happy:

"GGF has created a robust, working community to address a broad spectrum of Grid computing issues including standards and best practices, with participation from over 100 companies and several hundred organizations from over thirty countries. As a global forum, GGF has the representation, established venues, and processes in place to address a comprehensive set of issues including standards and lessons learned in deployment.

Enterprise Grid Alliance has elected to establish a separate organization to tackle issues regarding Grid deployment in the enterprise. Now that EGA has been formally announced, GGF is having discussions with EGA to determine how to best collaborate in the best interest of the Grid community, in both industry and research sectors. GGF will work with EGA to understand their objectives and plans with the goal of sustaining the momentum of the companies and organizations working together in the Grid community."

As a founding member, Sun sees advantages of EGA:

"We see a strong emergence of grid technology into the broader domain of enteprise computing which is why Grid is a key element in Sun's systems-based strategy for datacenter automation," said David Nelson-Gal, Sun's vice president of N1 Grid systems. "The N1 Grid System products have been used to create, provision and manage thousands of Grids. Our customer experience and our industry standards efforts in enterprise grid computing will provide value to the EGA."

Fujitsu Siemens mentioins its FlexFrame for my SAP Business Suite,as Grid middleware: the first complete realization of server virtualization and dynamic component provisioning for business applications available today. This architecture has become a reference blueprint for the realization of Grid in one box, the company says.

The web site can be found at: http://www.gridalliance.org