TORONTO -- Strengthening its commitment to drive Grid standards efforts and collaborative industry partnerships, Platform Computing Inc. has named Ian Baird as vice president of its recently expanded Marketing and Sales Operations division. Adding to his existing responsibilities as Chief Business Architect, Baird will lead Platform's global marketing strategy, including pricing, communications, competitive analysis, mergers and acquisitions, sales training and sales information management. Baird is an acknowledged Grid computing industry expert. In addition to spearheading Platform's Grid strategy, Baird, who is a member of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) Steering Committee, will continue to help accelerate Grid standards development efforts, leading Platform's involvement in the development of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). The OGSA is a set of technical specifications to define a common framework that will allow businesses to build Grids over a network, forming the basis for commercial Grid deployments and interoperable commercial technologies. Initial proposed technical specifications for the OGSA have been developed by the Globus Project and IBM, and are being put forward at the GGF for discussion, refinement, and eventual standardization. In his new role, Baird will work closely with key partners such as Dell, the Globus Project, HP, IBM and SGI, to lead the development of co-marketing programs to drive commercial acceptance and adoption of Grid computing. Over the past year, Platform has signed global Grid computing agreements with the major system vendors to market and deploy integrated Grid computing solutions to joint customers across the financial services, government, life sciences and manufacturing industries. "Industry standards are critical to Grid adoption and success, paving the way for interoperability and providing the collaborative context for partners to work together," said Baird. "Platform is committed to finding new ways to serve our customers together with key industry partners and prepare them for the next evolution of Grid computing." Baird sits on the Steering Committee of the GGF, an organization whose mandate is to promote and develop common approaches and shared solutions through consensus-based standards. He was also President of the New Productivity Initiative (NPi), a vendor-backed Grid standards organization, and led the merger with the GGF in April 2002. This created the largest industry-supported Grid organization worldwide, aimed at driving Grid computing to the next evolution of its development in the enterprise. "Ian's commitment to the standards effort and to accelerating Grid computing are well-known in the industry," said Robert Gordon, president and CEO, Platform Computing. "As the leading independent commercial Grid solutions and services provider, Platform is fully committed to the development of OGSA and is actively participating with GGF, Globus, IBM and other partners in the standards development process." Prior to joining Platform, Baird was senior vice-president at BCE Emergis, a provider of business-to-business e-commerce services, where he was responsible for marketing, sales and operations for global Retail, Distribution & Transportation industries. Before BCE Emergis, he was publisher and general manager of Southam Newspapers, a national Canadian media chain. Baird also acted as executive director of a business development and venture capital center.