INDUSTRY

Fifteen New ISVs Achieve IBM "Ready for Grid" Mark -- IBM today announced the company has expanded its broad ecosystem of application support for the company's Grid Computing business, including the IBM Grid and Grow offering it launched in August, 2005. Fifteen new ISVs have achieved IBM's "Ready for Grid" mark, validation that applications interoperate with the company's standards-based, flexible and scalable suite of software and hardware products for Grid Computing. The "Ready for Grid" mark validations are conducted worldwide at IBM Innovation Centers. These firms comprise a total of over 60 ISVs that have grid enabled applications to date to offer customers a flexible, virtual IT infrastructure where they can share computing resources, such as applications, data and computing power. IBM Grid and Grow offering is a packaged set of software, hardware and services designed to help companies in key industries like the public, industrial and financial sectors -- large or small -- get started with Grid computing, and as its name implies, grow. Linux is a key strategic underpinning of these standards-based, flexible, and secure grid implementations. The fifteen most recent IBM Business Partners earning the "Ready for Grid" mark include the following IBM Business Partners: Alphinat, Altair, Cognos, DataSynapse, eXludus, Gemstone, Objectivity, Online Insight, Platform Computing, SAS Institute, SearchSpace, Torex Retail, United Devices, Univa, and Voltaire. "Today's announcement continues to demonstrate the momentum IBM is making building broad support by Independent Software Vendors to grid-enable commercial applications in industries like the financial and industrial sectors," said Ken King, vice president of Grid computing, IBM. "The ecosystem building around the IBM Grid and Grow offering demonstrates Grid computing is moving beyond academia and research into the enterprise, and now, into the mid-market as well." Early adopter IBM grid computing Business Partners in industries in the research and development, government, financial, and industrial sector comprise many of the fifteen new organizations achieving the "Ready for Grid" mark. Alphinat, which provides solutions for e-government, enabled its application portfolio on WebSphere XD, a leading J2EE and application server Virtualization platform. "The enablement of Alphinat's Government Solutions portfolio on WebSphere XD offers our customers the opportunity to realize higher levels of infrastructure efficiency and flexibility running Alphinat's Government Solutions across a virtualized grid environment," said Philippe Lecoq, COO, Alphinat. Voltaire, which develops and markets interconnect solutions for high performance and grid computing, achieved the IBM "Ready for Grid" mark using massive computing power to solve complex problems. "Grid and Grow answers the call for an affordable and easy way to get started with Grid computing," said Patrick Guay, vice president, Marketing, Voltaire, Inc. "The combination of IBM blade servers and Voltaire's high performance, low latency InfiniBand-based switching solutions provides a scalable architecture that gives more enterprises access to the benefits of Grid computing."