GRIDipedia – The European Grid Marketplace

This document investigates in which contractual relations Grid actors can enter into, and which are the liabilities that they can incur.

This document focuses on those contracts that, according to the practice so far developed within business law, are more popular and are worthy of a study that must necessarily be international. The same approach is followed for the parts of this document that concern contractual liabilities that can affect Grid actors’ business.

The first chapter of the document is dedicated to the outsourcing agreement and other (and similar) related contracts, such as, mainly, Application Service Provider (ASP) agreement and network management services outsourcing. Without any doubt outsourcing represents today a great opportunity for every firm that is willing to reduce its costs and provide the customers with a better service, especially in the IT sector. Considering the great ambiguity around the term ‘outsourcing’ across Europe, the document analyzes the externalisation of services and goods that implies (and that does not imply) also transfer of assets and employees. This transfer is also addressed from the point of view of labour law, with attention given to the core of the outsourcing contract (that is the Service Level Agreement).

The second part of the document is dedicated to joint ventures and other ancillary agreements (like support service agreement and technology license). The structure of this agreement, and the clauses that should be taken into account, are analytically analyzed in this chapter.

The third section is dedicated to strategic alliances, as they have a pivotal role in the actual business scenarios worldwide. Outsourcing, joint ventures and strategic alliance are all linked and share the same rationale, as they constitute different forms and levels of cooperation between companies. In what they differ, and when one has to be preferred to the others, is addressed all along this document.

The last chapter will cover the topic of software contracts, concentrating on the license agreement, as it is probably the most relevant for every undertaking that is willing to make business in a Grid environment.

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