MIDDLEWARE

Financial services customers gain competitive edge through end-to-end grid solutions. Leading private equity firm is first pilot customer for new partnership in grid computing Digipede Technologies, the leading provider of distributed computing solutions for the Microsoft Windows platform, and West Monroe Partners, a full-service provider of business and technology solutions, today announced that West Monroe Partners will deliver the Digipede Network for one of their high-performance financial services customer engagements. West Monroe Partners consultants have been trained to grid-enable .NET applications to benefit mutual customers using the Digipede Network as West Monroe Partners expands its .NET practice in financial services. "Our clients in financial services are always looking for a competitive edge," said John Stone, Financial Services Practice Lead at West Monroe Partners. "As our clients employ more and more demanding applications, we wanted to show our customers a clear path to distributed computing in clusters and grids. The Digipede Network provides that path, with outstanding support for .NET and COM developers. As analytics, pricing algorithms and trading strategies continue to become more compute-intensive, Digipede provides our mutual customers with greater scalability and performance." Stone continues, "We've seen a lot of demand for high-performance .NET applications in the financial services market, and the Digipede Network is clearly a leading tool in this area. Digipede provides all the tools .NET architects and developers need to scale out critical applications across all available Windows resources. We've recently begun important customer engagements in grid computing, and we look forward to more collaboration with Digipede." "The pilot implementation at our client took less than two days," says Nathan A. Ulery, Technology Solutions Practice Leader at West Monroe Partners. "Our client has a custom .NET analytics tool that processes thousands of internal rate of return calculations. Prior to the Digipede Grid, this process took over 15 hours, now we are seeing the calculations complete in just a fraction of the time, and we observed a nearly linear rate of performance improvement as we added compute nodes." The West Monroe Partners team is now working with the client to determine the best manner in which to integrate this tool into their production environment and grid-enable additional functions. "Our client's investment professionals can now focus on analysis rather than scheduling batch jobs," Ulery continued. Digipede Technologies CEO John Powers adds, "This initiative with West Monroe Partners brings significant value to our mutual customers. By combining the industry-leading consulting expertise available from West Monroe Partners with the scalability of the Digipede Network, asset managers can create and deploy high-performance applications more easily than ever before. West Monroe Partners brings a rare combination of deep expertise in IT, excellent application development skills, and outstanding domain knowledge. We are pleased to partner with them for important engagements in financial services and other vertical markets." "Microsoft's partners are building incredible solutions on these new technologies," said Allison Watson, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft. "Our partners are the critical link to delivering customer value and solving complex industry, research and core business challenges. By working closely with partners like Digipede and West Monroe Partners, we are transforming the way people work and delivering on the promise of People Ready software." The Digipede Network is an affordable distributed computing solution built entirely on Microsoft .NET that dramatically improves the speed and performance of demanding real-world business applications. Integrated with Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, Windows Compute Cluster Server, and other Windows Server products, the Digipede Network is radically easier to buy, install and use than other grid-computing solutions. Using the Digipede Network, businesses can easily achieve the benefits of grid computing, including improved IT agility and increased application scalability. Developers can write .NET or COM applications that will take advantage of hundreds or thousands of computers, bringing the power of grid computing to the Windows platform.