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Groupe Societe Generale, Royal Bank of Canada, Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (LBBW), Adaptec, NCSA Embrace Platform Grid Solutions; Acceleration Centers(TM) Provide Customized Industry Solutions; Professional Services Practice Expands to Meet Growing Demand -- Platform Computing Inc., the largest independent grid software provider, today unveiled its strategy to help its customers Accelerate Intelligence(TM) with its grid computing technology. Platform's grid computing solutions help organizations improve business performance by increasing service levels and optimizing their IT infrastructure with software designed to plan, build, run, and manage grids. According to recent industry estimates, the grid computing marketplace is expected to grow to almost $4.89 billion by 2008(1), creating a significant opportunity for Platform, a US$50 million company which has remained profitable for 11 years with no external funding. The information technology industry is in crisis," said Songnian Zhou, CEO, Platform Computing. "Organizations are spending billions of dollars on technology, yet IT remains the most underutilized corporate asset. In fact, many organizations have no idea how their IT supports business performance. We believe there is a better way to leverage IT for business advantage. With our grid computing software and services, we can link an organization's core business objectives to its IT and help organizations overcome their IT constraints to make previously inconceivable ideas, businesses, products and services a reality. We call this Accelerating Intelligence." "The business value of grid computing is not only the possibility of more effective utilization of IT resources, but also the certainty of more effective insight into the factors that impact business performance," said Nick Gall, Senior Vice President, META Group. "Initially, users may adopt grid computing simply to get better visibility into their use of existing resources, however, we believe that grid computing will encourage organizations to re-evaluate how they use compute resources to drive business value and adopt new business models such as on demand and utility computing." To help its customers Accelerate Intelligence with grid computing, Platform today announced three key initiatives. These include: * Three Acceleration Centers(TM) to provide industry-specific grid computing solutions to global Financial Services, Government and Electronics customers; * An expanded global Professional Services practice to complement offerings from large system integrators and hardware vendors, to help organizations evaluate and implement grid computing to impact business performance; and * Platform will soon announce an integrated, OGSI-compliant product suite, new grid partnerships with firms such as Oracle, and new application integrations to help its customers gain business value from grid computing. Reinforcing the growing momentum for its grid solutions, Platform also announced 10 new customers. These include global financial services institutions such as Royal Bank of Canada, Groupe Societe Generale, Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (LBBW), and Capital One; electronics customers including Adaptec and Qualcomm; government agencies including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Japan's Hokkaido University; and European energy companies Schlumberger and TotalElfFina. "After decades of rapid technological change, IT has become siloed, static, and complex, and is often not aligned to business objectives. IT costs are skyrocketing, service levels are unstable and unpredictable and change happens at a snail's pace," said Zhou. "As a result, businesses are forced to make trade-offs between profitability and competitiveness, while business agility and performance suffers." "Our software orchestrates the execution of all applications across a grid infrastructure, matching demand with supply to improve utilization," he continued. "This capability allows our customers to integrate all of their distributed compute resources across the enterprise, and to run applications based on pre-arranged business priorities and policies. By providing the insight and confidence into how IT assets are being used, we can facilitate adaptation to change, enhance service capabilities, and reduce IT costs to improve business performance."