Closing ranks between industrial and academic distributed systems R&D has been and is on the agenda of many projects and initiatives. But although state-of-the-art service-oriented architectures and infrastructures are developed and deployed by both industry and academia, the services required and the service quality expected and provided differ significantly. Opening its mostly academically used Grid infrastructure to industry is an important objective of the D-Grid initiative. The SLA4D-Grid project is contributing to that goal by engineering a Service Level Agreement management layer on top of the existing infrastructure, providing e-Contracting capabilities to a large variety of industrial and academic customers. This layer will allow service providers and consumers to reliably and dependably build their business models upon it. This paper describes the aims of the SLA4D-Grid project, summarizes its developments, and shows how business use cases can benefit from an academic infrastructure enhanced with e-Contracting capabilities.

View full paper: echal09.pdf.