ENTERTAINMENT

TORONTO -- Platform Computing, the largest independent provider of grid software, today announced that SG CIB has selected Platform as a key partner for addressing its needs for grid computing. SG CIB is the third largest corporate and investment bank in the Euro zone and the ninth largest company in France, with a market capitalization of EUR 24 billion at the end of 2002. It has over 14.7 million customers in retail banking, nearly EUR 270 billion of assets under management (end 2002), and employs 80,000 people worldwide, nearly half of which are based outside France. SG CIB chose Platform Symphony(TM), which manages and accelerates the performance of online, real-time compute-intensive applications, after an extensive competitive evaluation, citing Platform's business-driven approach, technology and expertise in the financial services sector. The company is deploying Platform Symphony in its commodities department, where it will safely test and grid-enable interactive applications. It plans to expand this infrastructure throughout the organization. "In the financial services industry, market changes are measured in seconds and delays can mean the difference between profit and loss," said Michael Sharma, Vice President, Sales, Financial Services, Platform. "With our solutions, we can remove technology constraints and drive optimal performance. As a leading player in the global financial services arena, SG CIB's decision to use Platform technology underscores our commitment to provide solutions that deliver real, tangible business value." As data volume, regulatory and market pressures, and technical complexity increase, business performance is being constrained by an inflexible, static technology infrastructure. As a result, organizations are forced to make hard choices between speed and accuracy to maintain a competitive edge. To overcome this tradeoff, financial services organizations are using Platform Symphony to accelerate and grid-enable compute and time-sensitive applications in core front and middle office functions. Announced in September 2002, Platform Symphony is software for accelerating the development and performance of online, real-time, compute- and data-intensive applications, and managing the underlying IT infrastructure to make business-critical decisions faster and more accurately. To ensure accelerated performance, the product delivers unique industry-leading features, including an advanced Application Development Environment (ADE) that simplifies and accelerates the development of grid-enabled applications, turbocharged processing to run applications quickly and efficiently, intelligent workload orchestration and resource provisioning to dynamically match workload and application demand to IT resource supply and easy manageability through a centralized, web-based management interface. The product's real-time, service-oriented architecture allows organizations to maximize their IT resources and accelerate performance by hosting Web services and servicing high throughput and compute intensive requests. Platform Symphony is currently the only solution available that supports all commonly adopted standards, including .NET and J2EE, in production.