h the required programs and data. The use of idle storage resources is the major advantage of a data grid, and the focus is on the intelligent distribution and broadband interconnection of data pools. Collaboration grids-Research and knowledge workers will increasingly depend on collaborating with different distributed work groups, each with different competencies. Collaboration grids will contribute to better cooperation by connecting the systems of various owners. Such collabora- tion grids will simplify access to an exchange of data between these part- ners, accelerating processes and providing capacity on demand. This will lead to a reduction in development time and cost. Europe's CERN (www.cern.ch) is undertaking an exciting project involving grid computing. CERN is planning to start testing the Large Hadron Collider (the world's largest particle accelerator) in 2007, and it is building a data grid to accom- plish that. This experiment involves 40TBps, equivalent to the data generated if each person on the planet were speaking simultaneously into 20 phones. Even with a reduction of data via compression and such, it will still generate 8PB of data Introduction per year. In addition to CERN, 8 to 10 other large research centers, some 100 uni- versity research centers, and more than 1,000 other research institutions around the world plan to provide storage capacity. In the 1990s, the popular vision was that the network was the computer. In this decade, the network is computing. Real-Time Communications Industry analysts believe that within the next decade, the majority of business pro- cesses will be transacted in real-time, or at least near real-time. Real-time commu- nications will generate added value by reengineering and differentiating business processes. Real-time communications will substantially increase the speed, effi- ciency, and security of business processes. The core element of real-time communi- cations is the convergence of voice and data, based on Internet Protocol (IP). This technology allows 