What is e-Science Central?
This project will be a pilot scale demonstrator, illustrating the benefits of providing specialist software to users as services. The pilot will focus our efforts on a small number of select regional early adopters whilst demonstrating the benefits of a service based approach to software delivery. In so doing e-Science Central will provide the infrastructure and expertise required to deliver software tools and services to a much wider community of companies and end users in the region after the completion of this initial pilot phase.
Funding for the pilot has been provided under the The Single Programme of One NE and has been used to fund staff and equipment to test a prototype service infrastructure to provide software as services to high technology companies. A key aspect of this project is to develop a longer term business plan to create a sustainable business that will be able to supply software services after this project finishes. To support this, we have included a business analyst in the resources requested for this project. This project will be based at Newcastle University, but the services it develops will have complete regional coverage and, indeed, will be relevant on a global scale.
