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DataSynapse has achieved a market-leading position in the European financial services sector. Since opening the company headquarters for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in London in April 2002, DataSynapse has built an impressive customer list in the region. In 2004 the company added seven new clients to its roster, which now includes two top Swiss banks, three out of the top four French capital markets traders, two of the top four German banks, and two of the top Italian banks. “Adding seven leading European banks to our client base in twelve months is testament to the growing momentum for grid computing in Europe, and DataSynapse’s commitment to supporting that growth,” said Willy Ross, managing director for EMEA at DataSynapse. “CIOs are increasingly turning to grid and virtualisation as strategic IT initiatives that can significantly enhance business performance and service levels while radically reducing costs. As grid enables quicker time to market for new products, business units are realising greater profit margins that, in turn, drive the demand for grid enterprise-wide.” To support the company’s rapid growth, DataSynapse opened a Milan office in December 2004. In 2005, the company will strive to dominate the EMEA market by consolidating its market share in the UK, France and Italy, and expanding its efforts in Spain, the Nordic countries and South Africa. Based on the success of DataSynapse in the US insurance market, the first UK insurance client was won in mid-2004, and the company continue to focus its sales drive in this sector. “As we see the demand for virtualised computing resource grow, we will continue to grow our own team to support customer needs,” said Ross. “In the past year, we have already more than doubled our EMEA headcount and we shall continue to recruit quality people in 2005 to enable us to deliver the best possible service to our customer base.“ DataSynapse’s success in EMEA is largely due to its innovative product offering, which addresses industry demands for an agile and responsive IT infrastructure, enabling organisations to realise the benefits of a shared computing environment – from increased utilisation to reduced overhead and support costs. Enhancements to DataSynapse’s flagship grid computing software, GridServer, will be launched in early 2005. GridServer increases an organisation’s ability to best leverage the power of its IT infrastructure, improving quality of service and delivering cost reduction, containment and avoidance. From an IT perspective, grid technology can play a major part in infrastructure consolidation and the move to a service-oriented architecture. DataSynapse is also involved with several industry bodies such as the Global Grid Forum (GGF)*. The aim of the GGF is to promote and support the development, deployment and implementation of grid technologies and applications via the creation and documentation of "best practices" - technical specifications, user experiences and implementation guidelines. DataSynapse actively participates in the creation of grid standards with the GGF and other industry initiatives. In September 2004, Willy Ross chaired the financial services sub-group of the annual GGF conference in Bruxelles, reinforcing the company’s commitment to promoting the adoption of grid computing in EMEA. DataSynapse also sponsors the Guaranteed Distributed Computing (GDC) Council, a non-profit organisation co-founded with Intel in late 2002. The mission of this council is to provide member organisations with a forum for educating and examining distributed computing standards, emerging and current technologies, best of breed business practices and other issues related to grid computing. The Global Grid Forum (GGF) is a community-initiated forum of thousands of individuals from industry and research leading the global standardisation effort for grid computing. GGF's primary objectives are to promote and support the development, deployment, and implementation of Grid technologies and applications via the creation and documentation of "best practices" - technical specifications, user experiences, and implementation guidelines. For more information, please visit: http://www.gridforum.org/