The talk begins with a rapid survey of the technological drivers behind the IT
revolution. Increasingly, many areas of science involve access to distributed
computing and data resources, remote access to specialized and expensive
facilities and world-wide collaborations of scientists. There are many examples
of such e-Science endeavours ranging from bioinformatics and proteomics to
collaborative engineering and earth observation. To enable scientists to
maximize the science derived in such a fashion we will see the emergence of a
new IT infrastructure called the Grid. The Web gave us easy access to html
pages and information: the Grid will give us seamless access to a much wider
range of distributed resources. It will enable us to form transient Virtual
Organisations without compromising security or privacy. The Grid infrastructure
developed to allow interoperability and scalability of such heterogeneous and
dynamic resources has obvious interest for industry. The talk concludes with
some examples of Grid technology in an industrial context. The UK e-Science
Programme is also briefly described.