Dear PC members, I've discussed this industry track within the Grid Computing Now project and we've come up with some thoughts on the general outline of the event. These seem to be in line with what we discussed on the first telcon. I'd like to take this further on tomorrow's call, as I'm sure you will have thoughts to add. I think we need to agree on an outline at this level quickly so that we can then progress to a more detailed plan. 1. Audience. We want to target IT leaders who are potential users of Grid and related technologies. The aim is to raise awareness of what these technologies can do for business now, rather than to sell a grand vision (although that can be there in the background). 2. Marketing. We believe the industry track needs to be marketed as a separate component of the main event. We don't mean this in the way of establishing a separate annual event a la GridWorld, but the industry track should have a name of its own and people should be able to register easily for just the days of the industry track. This target audience is unlikely to be interested in the other activities of OGF20 (at least, not yet...). E.g. we could call the track "Grids Mean Business", hosted by OGF & GCN; the registration page would have "Grids Mean Business" as one option for registration (and this would register people for the relevant days of OGF20). 3. Setting the scene. We need an opening presentation (or set of presentations) that give an introduction to modern computing infrastructures (Virtualisation, SOA and Web Services, Grid), introducing the key concepts and their relationships. We should stress that we're not purist about the meaning of "Grid"'; we use whatever works to solve business problems. 4. We need a mixture of case studies and discussion panels, covering issues such as: utility computing; data centre grids; software as a service (perhaps leading to Grid markets), collaborative Grids (e.g. supply chains). These should focus on solving business problems. Ideally the case studies will cover several sectors so that we can market the event within those sectors. 5. Then we need to cover issues of scaling, leading to the challenges of truly large-scale resource managment. I look forward to hearing your suggestions and comments. Best wishes, Dave Berry Technology Lead, Grid Computing Now! National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street Edinburgh, EH8 9AA +44 131 651 4039