The Georgian Research and Educational Networking Association GRENA was founded in 1999 for the purpose of development of Information Technologies in educational and research field. GRENA has implemented a number of important projects that contributed to the development of information technology in Georgia.

20th anniversary celebration of GRENA took place on September 12, 2019 at the Radisson Blu Iveria Hotel Tbilisi, Georgia and was attended by more than 130 guests from international and local research, educational and IT community and governmental representatives. The event was attended by the delegates of partner organizations of GRENA from 9 countries as well as the representatives of Georgian leading communication companies.

The event commenced with a welcome speech of the director general of the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia, Zviad Gabisonia. He highlighted the importance of the cooperation between GRENA and the National Science Foundation for the scientific society and noted: “The memorandum of understanding was signed between GRENA and the National Science Foundation in August according to which researchers will use advantage of computing and storage resources of GRENA cloud infrastructure that will support the advancement of Georgian scientific community“.

Giorgi Sharvashidze, the rector of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University addressed the present audience and mentioned: ”Tbilisi State University together with association GRENA was actively involved in implementation of NATO science program. With the support of these projects connection of university’s main buildings with the fiber optic channels and modernization of network infrastructure was achieved. The establishment of first GRID (distributed computing) cluster in Georgia that is integrated in European GRID infrastructure on the basis of GRENA was also extremely important”.

European Commission funded EaPConnect project manager Veronica Di Luna noted: “The participation of GRENA in EU funded project EaPConnect is benefitial for broad audience. Researchers and students require exchanging the data, establishing international collaborations and having digital security. The role of eduroam, the secure world-wide Internet roaming access service, is tremendous for the researchers and the students. In Georgia - Association GRENA provides the eduroam service for research and education institutions”.

The executive director of GRENA Ramaz Kvatadze talked about the work of the organization and discussed the future plans. Activities of GRENA include the following main areas: providing Information Technology services to users and implementation of new, innovative services, IT education, preparation and implementation of research and technology projects and promoting and supporting IT development in Georgia.