APPLICATIONS

ASPEED Software, which optimizes application performance on high-end systems, today announced its most successful year to-date, with 300 percent growth in customer deployments and revenue. Customers across computationally intensive industries are increasingly exploiting ACCELERANT, ASPEED's performance-driving software, which now supports the most advanced architectures, including the IBM Blue Gene system and several Intel multi-core processors. Demand is especially high in the financial services, pharmaceutical, life sciences and energy industries. These organizations consistently reduce application run times by more than 80 percent, development times by 90 percent and improve overall capacity for the most sensitive business practices – from securities pricing and portfolio balancing, to drug modeling and protein synthesis. Highlights for 2006 include: - Setting new high-performance computing benchmarks for speed and analysis on the IBM Blue Gene, Intel Clovertown quad-core processor and dual-core Woodcrest processor for the AMBook (American Options Portfolio) application, used by almost every company on Wall Street. - Expanding support for 10 development languages, and market-specific tools, which power the most advanced applications: Linux, C#, Java, FORTRAN, C/C++, EXCEL/VBA, Intel compilers, NONMEM, MG Alpha and MOSES. - Multiple marquee customer deployments. Solutions are now in place at three of the world's top 10 investment banks, two top-20 global pharmaceutical companies and multiple financial services providers. Optimizing IT Investments ASPEED's customers are transforming their IT investment strategy, by zeroing in on application performance and maximizing existing resources. As a result, they avoid the need to constantly invest in new hardware. ACCELLERANT is the only technology that lets applications fully leverage grid, cluster, multi-core, multi-CPU and other HPC environments -- while keeping the underlying software intact. Driving performance without altering the code ensures the integrity of the core application. It also protects critical proprietary algorithms that drive business decisions, which typically represent tens of millions of dollars in programming resources. "New processor developments like Blue Gene change the game by making parallel processing a must-have for any decision-driven business that expects to remain competitive," said Kurt Ziegler, evp of development for ASPEED. "Companies need flexible, scalable tools that exploit this new capability – immediately – while preserving their core software investments." ASPEED also: - Expanded into Europe and Asia, with new deployments and partners, including Net2S, FIFTHWAVE Solutions and ViewPoint Software. - Deepened its vertical strategy with key partners, including Towers Perrin and Milliman for insurance, Algorithmics for financial services and IKON/Globomax and Pharsight for pharmaceutical solutions. - Received expanding recognition, presenting at top industry events, including GridWorld, High Performance on Wall Street, Intel Developers' Forum, RiskUSA and the Quant Congress.