Grid technology player Platform Computing announced it will be hosting a workshop entitled "Science-Driven Enterprise Grids: Addressing Application, Compute and Data Requirements" at the 2005 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo on May 17. Jim Coble, director, Life Sciences for Platform Computing will lead the full day workshop, which will feature several Platform customers and partners -- including Pfizer, Harvard Medical School, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Wyeth, and The BioTeam -- presenting real world case studies that illustrate the challenges and qualitative and quantitative results of deploying enterprise grids. What: "Science-Driven Enterprise Grids: Addressing Application, Compute and Data Requirements" In the life science industry, grid computing is becoming mission critical technology owing to its ability to shorten the drug discovery and clinical trial development process from years to days. R&D IT pressures to consolidate, implement new OS platforms, better utilize existing infrastructure and share resources have all lead to growth in grid computing solutions. There are both challenges as well as great rewards involved in investing, implementing and optimizing such solutions. At the end of the session, leading application, hardware, and software vendors will team with users for an interactive, round table discussion on grid technology. When: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 from 8:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m. Topics Covered: 1) Application integrations 2) Life Science IT domain expertise through consulting 3) Customer use cases in Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Clinical Development, Discovery Research, Academic Research and Molecular Modeling 4) Connecting clusters and desktops to form enterprise grids that implement fairshare and preemptive workload policies 5) Bringing disparate groups together to share resources in both commercial and academic environments Who Should Attend: CFOs, CIOs and CEOs interested in increased profitability, service, reliability and competitive advantage with proven, predictable ROI from grid IT Managers who need to virtualize, aggregate and manage their infrastructure Bioinformaticians, Scientists, and Research and Development Managers who are interested in using leading-edge solutions that improve their products, processes and profitability while reducing costs Key Takeaways: Attendees of the workshop will: * Learn how to quickly increase the utilization and throughput of your existing computational resources * Receive practical knowledge on what software applications your organization uses today that best fit a grid-enabled computing infrastructure * Understand the benefits of deploying an enterprise-wide grid strategy * Hear first hand from innovative IT leaders at leading biotech and pharma companies who have been using grid technology for years Platform's commercial grid solutions give life sciences companies the agility necessary to streamline and replicate processes, direct resources to the validation of successful candidates, and reduce physical lab testing. By allowing scientists and researchers to focus on business-critical science rather than IT and specific applications, life sciences organizations ultimately have more time in the marketplace under patent protection before generic competitor drugs start to erode market share and revenues. Platform's software enables these organizations to optimize existing IT resources to manage consolidation effectively, anticipate and respond to regulatory issues, and support new business processes for faster, smarter decision-making -- resulting in increased profitability, service, reliability and competitive advantage.