e-Science Central offers a comprehensive selection of specialist software and content management web-services. These services give technology based businesses significant competitive advantage where content, specialised analysis, presentation, visualisation and design are critical to competitiveness. e-Science Central will enable end user companies to pick and mix services to suit their business goals and stage of development, paying for them at the point of use. Business growth can be encouraged by lowering the barriers to entry for technology based businesses, accelerating the growth of regional technology clusters.
The provision of software as services has a number of benefits to end users: there is greater flexibility in choosing which software to use at any given time, the up-front costs associated with using this software can be minimised as products are typically charged on a pay-per use basis and also the infrastructure investments required by end users are minimised as the majority of the computationally intensive activities are carried out on shared servers.
