With its generous timescales and high tolerance of risk, the R&D sector offers vendors an unparalleled opportunity to experiment with technology and to stretch it to its limits, to explore new ways of doing things and to define new trends. At the same time, the R&D sector benefits from the participation of commercial technology vendors not only for funding purposes, but also to help drive research in a direction that could have a favourable impact on society and the economy.

Oracle is currently participating in a number of R&D projects that are contributing to the development of new and better computing architectures. Competency development and research funding, tests, proofs of concept and use-case validation are amongst the key activities Oracle runs within the R&D sector, both in Applied and Fundamental Research.

A major part of the research is around building a reliable, dynamic and flexible IT infrastructure where applications and services can be used in a modular, functionality-driven and secure way. Grid computing is now mature enough for many organisations to start to benefit from it, but there remain many challenges to overcome before we have truly mastered the art of computing in very large distributed environments. For example, Oracle and its R&D partners are currently investigating better ways to enable virtualisation and orchestration, paving the way for improved Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Event-Driven Architectures.

While Oracle works with the scientific and commercial R&D sectors to refine its Grid and service-based computing vision, it is also taking care to establish mutually beneficial partnerships that will lay the foundations for long-term working relationships. R&D organisations and worldwide scientific collaborations currently engaged in projects with Oracle include:

CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research): The 25-year old relationship between Oracle and the birthplace of the of the World Wide Web has culminated in the openlab partnership, a collaborative project between CERN and the IT industry that is looking to develop cutting-edge applications of Grid Computing technologies.

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics : through the VitalIT project, Oracle established a close working relationship with key Swiss Institutes in the field of Bioinformatics and their counterparts in Europe. VitalIT offers a unique platform to investigate new challenges and apply emerging, new technologies to this field. Most of the work revolve around SwissProt, one of the world's most important protein sequence databases.

S-Sicilia : Oracle investigates in close collaboration with the Italian Consortium Cometa possible underlying data management technology for the grid. The COMETA consortium comprises academic and research institutions and secured €11m in funding from the Italian government to create a powerful computing grid for the island of Sicily.

As Oracle has become involved in greater numbers of R&D projects, we have put in place an internal structure to define and standardise the engagement process with the R&D community. We are now co-ordinating activity at a European level, giving each project a greater level of visibility, focus and support within Oracle.

The European dimension of our R&D activity reflects also Oracle's interest and participation in EU supported technology initiatives ( CoreGRID, Challengers Support Action, Nessi) and projects. These activities are further complemented by the leading role that Oracle has taken in standard bodies such W3C and the Open Grid Forum.

The coming months and years in the R&D sector will be crucial for the development of future IT architecture and services. Oracle is excited and proud to be contributing to the realisation of current technological vision.