The data handling problems of the LHC experiments are of special interest to commercial firms because of their scale and scope, and the apparent overlap with the emerging business structures of multinational corporations.

Although corporations (clients or database vendors) have not yet begun to grapple with the problem of Petabyte-scale data management and access over networks, it is expected (according to well-established projections of the growth in corporations' stored data volume) that many medium and large corporations will have to manage data volumes in this range by 2005.

The "LHC" data problem will thus evolve from a leading edge concern of HENP, to a central issue for international commerce over the next few years. HEP's position in these developments is thus analogous to the "computing" problem of the 1980's, where HEP had to develop special purpose processors (and now special purpose database and network applications) to meet its needs.