IBM and BNP Paribas today announced that the largest on-demand computing service in the global investment banking community has gone live. IBM is providing supercomputing power through its new London Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) center to support BNP Paribas’ expanding derivatives operations. The implementation of this service follows the recent three-year on-demand computing deal between the two companies for an initial capacity of 2500 IBM BladeCenter servers and scope for up to 2500 more. BNP Paribas leads the market in pricing and hedging very complex derivatives and was voted the Interest Rate Derivative house of the year in 2005. Its derivatives applications include computation algorithms that require an increasing amount of computer power. “We conducted an extensive review of the various options to provide the capacity to support our applications for the second half of 2006 and beyond - indeed over 18 options were fully explored,” said Bruce Lee, Head of Fixed Income Capital Markets Production at BNP Paribas. “IBM’s on-demand option emerged as the most competitive on price/performance, comparing favorably with buying hardware and hosting it ourselves. Now, having gone live in under 3 months we are confident we made the right choice.” BNP Paribas also had the objective to build a calculation capability that could meet the derivatives needs from New York and Tokyo - processing their compute jobs on the central calculation farm in Europe. The bank now has IBM’s dual-core, energy efficient BladeCenter server systems as well as the flexibility and capacity of its DCCOD centre which together support BNP Paribas’ rapidly growing Fixed Income derivatives business. Nick Gair, Infrastructure Solutions, IBM said: “DCCOD offers our clients the flexibility to leverage vast computing resources and expertise while helping to conserve valuable floor space and reduce energy requirements – especially in areas where their need for immense computing power is prone to dramatic growth or variability.” BNP Paribas is the second major bank to opt to use IBM’s new London DCCOD centre which opened only last month. IBM’s Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centre is located at a secure facility in London and is linked to a similar secure centre located in New York as well as to further back-up sites. These facilities enable customers to: - Rapidly respond to their new and changing business opportunities - Compete at a scale that may not previously have been possible for them - Easily tap into massive amounts of supercomputing power that could be otherwise unaffordable - Rapidly deploy supercomputing capacity in response to urgent business opportunities - Pay for supercomputing capacity on a variable cost basis, which may help avoid large up-front capital outlays and long term fixed IT cost commitments - Lower overall supercomputing ownership and operating costs - Take advantage of a scalable, highly secure and highly resilient on demand operating environment - Improve price/performance for compute-intensive applications and processing of massive amounts of data - Access a variety of technology to optimally serve the needs of diverse applications For more information on IBM, please visit its Web site.