INDUSTRY

Further extending its leadership in the Grid computing market, IBM announced today that Higo Bank and UniCredit are the newest businesses to deploy Grid computing solutions based on IBM technology. In addition to the financial institutions, IBM announced an expansion of the IBM Grid and Grow offering, with participation by SAS and Absoft Corporation, as well as the introduction of a new Ready for Grid Computing program. The Grid and Grow offering is a powerful solution designed to help companies in key industries, including industrial, public sector and financial, get started with Grid computing. SAS is the newest major ISV to deliver an application on top of the Grid and Grow offering, while Absoft Corporation has designed its High-Performance Computing Software Development Kit (HPC SDK) to deliver compelling performance tools for the IBM Grid and Grow offering. The announcements were made at GridWorld in Boston. Today's announcements accelerate IBM's commitment to expand industry adoption of Grid computing, which allows organizations to dynamically share information and computer resources. By implementing Grid computing solutions, IBM is helping customers solve problems that they couldn't solve previously. IBM currently has major, ongoing Grid computing projects around the world that enable customers to analyze the value of an investment portfolio in minutes rather than hours, unite global research teams to take advantage of the most up-to-date information, significantly accelerate drug discovery process, cut the design time of product, reduce the instances of defects, and scale businesses to meet cyclical demand. The Rise of Information Grids Financial services organizations around the world are adopting Grid computing at an accelerating pace because it enables companies to quickly and inexpensively virtualize their existing distributed IT resources, regardless of geographic location or operating platform, turning what would otherwise be non-performing assets into ones that can be used around the clock. While many businesses already use Grid computing as a way to share computational resources, information Grids represent a new collaborative way for integrating, federating and analyzing disparate information to provide significant business insight. This is one of the fastest growing areas of Grid computing today. Banking is one sector that is benefiting by deploying information Grids. Rather than attempt to replace countless systems in which banks have already made large investments, information Grids allow a business to "virtualize" its dispersed data into a single presentation and application layer. This allows a bank to deploy a single Grid architecture across all its data sources, including legacy databases, as well as other disparate data sources. One example of an information Grid, announced today, is being deployed at Higo Bank. -- Higo Bank -- One of Japan's major regional banks, Higo instituted an information Grid solution from IBM that provided data on demand by enabling the management of various loan systems at multiple platforms, providing real-time application integration, and speeding up the customer loan process from application to completion by thirty percent, and at a reduced cost for the bank. The Grid solution was built on IBM eServer pSeries, TotalStorage (Enterprise Storage Server and Linear Tape Open Drives), DB2, and WebSphere Information Integrator. Higo's new financing system built on IBM's Grid computing technology integrates existing heterogeneous systems. The Grid centrally manages information collected from customers and transactions to build a database of customer information. It also provides a system environment that enables the bank to process all financing operations - from the reception of requests for financing to the management of credit -- under the same system platform. In addition to Higo Bank, IBM is also announcing a Grid implementation at UniCredit: -- UniCredit -- One of Italy's largest and fastest growing banking institutions, UniCredit has implemented a Grid computing solution built on IBM BladeCenter, running DataSynapse's GridServer software as part of a Pricing Risk Management/Analytics Acceleration Grid. UniCredit engaged IBM to install a new technology environment for its latest risk management application, deployed on a dedicated Grid environment for the risk management application using IBM BladeCenter technology. IBM implemented a total of 44 IBM BladeCenter HS20 blade servers running the Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server V3 operating system in a Grid configuration with DataSynapse Grid computing software. The Grid configuration provides the resilient environment UniCredit needs to support its new risk management application and enable near real-time calculations. The Grid computing environment yields faster response time, increased processing times and improved business resiliency for UniCredit's new risk management application. With this increased processing capability, the bank can analyze a larger volume of data in a shorter period of time, ensuring that customers receive the appropriate price. "IBM has implemented more large-scale Grid solutions than any other vendor," said Ken King, vice president, Grid computing at IBM. "The reason businesses, such as Higo Bank and UniCredit and hundreds more, turn to IBM is because we've made significant investments in people and technology to help customers implement Grid solutions that help them transform their businesses. IBM has Grid computing experts in every major global market and industry, and we expand upon those skills to assist our customers through a variety of Grid centers, including IBM Design Centers, Grid Integration Centers, and IBM Research." Adds King: "IBM can offer a full spectrum of Grid solutions that helps customers at all levels with technology that addresses their individual IT and business needs." IBM Expands Grid Ecosystem Leadership with Absoft, SAS and Univa IBM also announced SAS as the newest ISV to join its Grid and Grow Offering, launched last August at LinuxWorld. The IBM Grid and Grow offering is a powerful solution designed to help customers get started with Grid computing. It is built using the industry leading IBM BladeCenter platform, featuring Intel-based blades running Linux and other operating systems. SAS has also committed to participate in IBM's Ready for Grid computing program, which validates that an application is capable of executing and realizing benefits from running in a Grid computing environment. The new program also includes "The Ready for IBM GRID Computing" mark, which is a critical component of IBM's strategy to create a robust ecosystem with our partners around open Grid standards. "Since becoming the first enterprise business intelligence vendor to join the Global Grid Forum in 2003, SAS has continued to invest in enhancing our Grid computing capabilities to meet customer needs for increased scalability and faster results," said Keith Collins, chief technology officer at SAS. "We are pleased to be the first enterprise BI vendor undergoing joint validation efforts under IBM's 'Ready for Grid' program, giving our customers confidence in SAS solutions running on an IBM Grid infrastructure." Also today, Absoft Corporation, a leading provider of high performance software development tools, announced that its High Performance Computing Software Development Kit (HPC SDK) has been designed for IBM's new Grid and Grow cluster hardware. The SDK's preconfigured software combined with the IBM Grid and Grow offering hardware and services efficiently delivers performance-tuning benefits of Grid computing to businesses large and small. In a separate announcement, IBM and Univa Corporation also jointly agreed to deliver an enterprise-ready release of the open-standards based Globus Toolkit on IBM platforms. Under the multi-year agreement, Univa will deliver a commercially supported release of the open-source Globus software for use across IBM's eServer platforms running both AIX and Linux, including IBM eServer iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, zSeries and BladeCenter systems. IBM will provide resources and intellectual property to Univa in support of this agreement. Grid computing is a key enabler of IBM's Systems agenda. IBM's Grid capabilities provide customers the ability to virtualize their application workloads and information resources across the enterprise, delivering on the commitment to "virtualize everything" for customers.