ARMONK, NY — IBM today announced a series of Grid projects around the world as part of its industry leading Grid computing program. In addition, together with business intelligence software provider SAS and other partners, IBM introduced new Grid-based product offerings that address the unique, compute-intensive needs of the banking and financial markets industry. IBM also announced agreements with new Grid middleware partners Avaki and United Devices. These developments further demonstrate the rapid emergence of Grid computing as a viable alternative for the most demanding and sophisticated commercial enterprises. Among the Grid projects announced today by IBM: Morgan Stanley — IBM has been working with Morgan Stanley to migrate analytical applications to run across a grid of Intel processor servers resulting in a marked reduction of processing time. "IBM has demonstrated significant performance improvement in a financial analytics application that runs across a Grid of several hundred Intel processor-based machines," said Richard Anfang, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley. "Morgan Stanley continues to pursue advanced distributed computing models as part of our strategy to further improve the flexibility and utilization of our computing assets." Hewitt Associates — IBM worked with Hewitt Associates, the global outsourcing and HR consulting firm, to build a Grid, Linux and WebSphere-based solution for the company's pension modeling application. The solution features IBM ™ zSeries® mainframe and IBM BladeCenter™ technologies working in tandem with DataSynapse's GridServer software. On the Grid, Hewitt reduced its transaction costs by some 90 percent, without rewriting their applications. NLI Research Institute — The NLI Research Institute, a company of the Nippon Life Insurance Group, recently began a joint research project with IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory to reduce processing time for the company's financial risk management solution using Monte Carlo simulation through the use of Grid technology. Early results have reduced processing time from ten hours to 49 minutes. IBM also has Grid computing projects underway at Singapore's Ngee Ann Polytechnic, one of the country's leading institutions of higher learning. Ngee Ann is the first polytechnic in Singapore to implement Grid computing, allowing staff and students to share data and processing power; at Germany’s T-Systems, a unit of Deutsche Telecom, for the development of a Grid Demonstration Center at T-Systems High Security Datacenter in Frankfurt to enable Grid computing in commercial enterprises; and at IN2P3 (Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules) where IBM and IN2P3 are deploying Grid Services using the Globus Toolkit 3. IN2P3 and IBM also are using Grid technology to support Life Sciences Research and to better manage peak requests for data on the IN2P3 system. “Leading customers in the financial services, banking, telecommunications and education industries are putting Grid computing to work to address their most mission critical business challenges,” said Tom Hawk, General Manager, IBM Grid Computing. “Increasingly, our commercial customers around the globe are turning to Grid technologies to help them improve the utilization, responsiveness, and reduce the cost of their IT assets.” New Financial Market Offerings In addition, continuing its commitment to developing Grid-based solutions that address the specific needs of vertical industries, IBM today introduced two new offerings for the financial services industry: The IBM Grid Offering for Analytics Acceleration: Customer Insight in Banking — IBM and SAS introduce a new Grid offering for Customer Analytics in the Banking industry. IBM utilized the SAS Credit Scoring application as part of the SAS Banking Intelligence solution to show that applications can be readily Grid-enabled. SAS was able to "plug and play" into the Grid environment without customized programming. The offering enhances a bank’s competitiveness by accelerating its customer insight applications, reducing its cycle time for executing statistical models, and providing more sophisticated analysis and increased accuracy of customer acquisition and retention. In addition, SAS provides a wide range of solutions for Financial Markets that address compliance, fraud detection and other risk management functions. The IBM Grid Offering for Risk Management and Compliance: Capital Markets and Retail Banking — This offering, developed in conjunction with DataSynapse, is designed to help risk managers implement a Grid infrastructure to support real-time credit limit monitoring. Currently, many of these applications are run overnight. The offering can also form the foundation for a credit risk application infrastructure that complies with Basel II and can help financial firms to comply more efficiently with the Patriot Act, Sarbanes-Oxley Act and NYSE Rule 92. Because a company’s existing infrastructure does not need to be replaced, firms can leverage their existing capital investments while moving to a higher-performance, lower cost, standards-based solution. Grid Partner Agreements Separately, IBM also announced Master Relationship Agreements with Grid middleware providers Avaki and United Devices. Avaki, of Burlington, Massachusetts, is a provider of enterprise information integration software based on Grid technology. United Devices of, Austin, Texas, provides secure Grid solutions for businesses of all sizes. IBM and its partners offer 19 Grid solutions in nine vertical industries.