INTERCONNECTS

In an industry report issued November 2003 titled, "Grid Computing in Financial Markets", author Larry Tabb wrote that utility/grid computing technology was inevitable. Sixteen months later in a follow up industry report released today by TABB Group, "Next-Gen Utility/Grid Computing: Financial Markets Needs, Components and Vendors", Tabb asks, "Is utility computing ready for prime time and are firms ready to adopt?" According to Tabb, founder and CEO at TABB Group, the answer is both yes and no. "Yes, financial firms are seeking a more flexible way to manage their computing infrastructure and resource utilization. But most are not looking to outsource their complete computing infrastructure to a third party or a shared infrastructure." While it is true, he explains, that "firms are looking to create more of a flexible, utility-type data center infrastructure within their organization, existing technology is simply not robust enough at the current time for this to be a reality." Without a more holistic and automatic/autonomic way of managing a firm's infrastructure, technology, instead of moving the industry forward, it will be the anchor that limits progress. However, Tabb believes that utility computing and the automated data center are the answers to this challenge and the next steps forward in the evolution of better, more holistic technology management tools and a more efficient and effective technology infrastructure. With current technology spending for the utility data center/grid at $88 million, comprised of $48 million for software and $41 million in services, TABB Group currently projects that this market will increase by as much as 1,400% to $1.2 billion by 2010 - $660 million for software and $770 million for services, exclusive of high-speed connectivity, security or entitlement. Smaller, visionary vendors are now developing the new technology needed, but it will be the major data center management tool vendors that will drive wide-scale implementation. Adds Tabb, "not surprisingly, the smaller vendors may have the technology but the larger vendors still have the size, the pocketbooks to acquire and the customer relationships to make this a reality." The new 34-page report also investigates the drivers, taxonomy and 16 vendors currently developing cutting-edge utility solutions, including utility data center providers, traditional high-performance firms, utility data center technology, compute and data virtualization and application parallelization; analyzes the 13 major components required for the utility infrastructure and how they integrate; provides an in-depth analysis of utility computing adoption, market size projections and estimates of projected growth levels in financial markets. A copy of the report and an executive summary are available at www.tabbgroup.com/research .