EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - Providing Advanced Internet Methods & Emergent Systems for businesses AIMES Centre

Providing Advanced Internet Methods & Emergent Systems for businesses AIMES Centre - Liverpool, UK

Introduction

The AIMES Centre offers significant business expertise alongside accessible computing resources, for the benefit of local and regional businesses in the Merseyside area.

Problem

In 2001, a number of studies indicated the importance of e-business and ICT in stimulating economic growth and its potential to achieve widespread costs and efficiency savings across all sectors. At the same time, the UK government was making significant investments in science. As The University of Liverpool is home to the largest e-business research centre in UK, an opportunity arose to deploy those skills in conjunction with activities around e-science for business.

Additionally, it was known that Merseyside had a shortage of high-growth, high technology businesses and high value jobs. As such the AIMES project was designed to assist existing SMEs to improve business performance and to create new high growth technology businesses.

Description

Using advanced Internet technologies, such as Grid computing, AIMES allows companies to access massive computing resource on a ‘utility model’, allowing them to more effectively carry out processing and storage intensive tasks, to build virtual business communities and exploit new markets.

Working with a range of commercial partners, the Centre's goal is to translate e-science into e-business – in response to real market needs. AIMES achieves this through a range of initiatives including assisting local Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), partnering with regionally based corporations and creating new start-up companies.

Approach

AIMES has now been operating since 2003. During that time it has put in a place a comprehensive infrastructure comprising of human and technical resources. An applications development team of approximately 20 people is supplemented by a dedicated business development team. A 400-node grid cluster is linked into a 1,000-node facility at the University of Liverpool, providing significant computing resource.

The Centre works with stakeholders across a number of areas including:

blue chip organisations inside and outside of the region;
complementary science projects such as NW Science Grid and Daresbury Laboratory; and
sector organisations within Merseyside and the North West of England.

Results

AIMES has been highly successful in finding innovative ways of identifying real market need and applying university ICT expertise to tackle these challenges. In combination with business development these solutions can be generalised to apply to existing businesses.
AIMES has also delivered on its original outputs, creating 13 new high-tech, high growth businesses to capitalise on the advanced technologies being developed at the Centre.
AIMES has also played a key role in creating high value jobs within the local economy. To date AIMES has been instrumental in creating / safeguarding 101 jobs within the region. Additionally, 64 Merseyside businesses have received assistance and support from AIMES.

EU involvement

This practice was presented at the Fourth Best Practice Conference New Horizons in Graz, Austria on 15 November 2006. The conference aimed at promoting exchange of experience and dissemination of best practice between authorities involved in the implementation on EU Structural Funds Programmes in Europe. It was destined to contribute to improving quality of implementation of Structural Funds on the basis of project presentations and visits.

Contact info

AIMES Centre
Brian McCaul (Director of Business Development)

Project start date

01/01/2001

Links

Visit the AIMES Centre website Visit the GRAZ Best Practice Conference website

Download the 'Providing Advanced Internet Methods & Emergent Systems for businesses AIMES Centre' Report (PDF, Eng, 65 KB)

Document type

case

Themes

Urban Policy > Economy knowledge & employment

Keywords

Digital services, Urban economy