PROCESSORS

The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) announced five new members, signifying a 20 percent increase in membership since the start of the year. The EGA now consists of 30 organizations working closely together to accelerate the adoption of Grid computing in the enterprise. UK e-Science Core Program, Unisys, Univa, Voltaire and The 451 Group, represent a broad range of organizations -- research groups, hardware and software vendors, IT consultancies and a technology industry analyst company -- all committed to, and invested in, bringing grid solutions to the enterprise. These new members will be instrumental in helping the EGA address obstacles that organizations face using enterprise Grids. They will also look at best practices and open and interoperable solutions to help customers implement and deploy Grid solutions. "We are thrilled to start 2005 as a 30-member strong team with significant momentum and increased ability to propel this market forward," said Donald Deutsch, president of the Enterprise Grid Alliance and vice president of standards strategy and architecture at Oracle. "Joining other key industry players in the alliance, these five new members add new perspective and credibility to EGA's focus on accelerating the adoption of Grid computing within the enterprise." Representing a broad cross-section of leading technology companies, the EGA welcomes its newest members that are committed to driving the adoption of Grid computing: UK e-Science Core Programme UK e-Science Core Program was initiated in 2000 to develop large-scale Grid computing infrastructures for inter-enterprise collaboration that extends across multiple projects and commercial applications within the scientific community. The Program unites the parties involved in this development to provide support and broker these technology solutions to enable e-Science. "e-Science is a vision to create a powerful infrastructure to carry out global and virtual collaborations in science," said Professor Tony Hey, director of the UK e-Science Core Program. "By working with the EGA, we can continue our momentum and turn our vision of a collaborative scientific community into a reality." Unisys Unisys is a worldwide information technology services and solutions company with expertise in consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, infrastructure and server technology. Unisys helps clients in more than 100 countries quickly and efficiently achieve competitive advantage. "The adoption of a Grid computing philosophy is expanding from academic, research and scientific usage to fill broader commercial needs such as new approaches to utilization, consolidation, and the management of enterprise resources and information," said David Houseman, chief technology officer at Unisys. "Within the Grid framework, Unisys ES7000 servers function as modular and highly scalable supernodes -- and we're finding clients are increasingly interested in learning how industry-standard Grid technology can complement their existing data center infrastructures. EGA is an important forum to ensure that enterprise Grid technologies develop and integrate to address a wide range of customer needs, and we are pleased to have this opportunity to influence the development of Grid standards and solutions." Univa Founded in early 2004 by Globus pioneers Steve Tuecke, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, Univa bases its solutions on Globus software. Univa's products, solutions, and services focus on providing commercially supported, open source middleware that can be used by their partners and enterprise customers in conjunction with a broad set of branded products and technologies. "Commercial organizations are looking to open standards as the catalyst for broader use of Grid technologies," saidTuecke, chief executive officer. "As a company whose mission is predicated on the adoption of such standards, Univa is excited to participate in the EGA's efforts to make Grid an enterprise IT reality." Voltaire Voltaire develops and markets industry-leading interconnect solutions for high performance Grid computing. Voltaire offers a complete family of InfiniBand interconnect solutions including the Voltaire ISR 9288, the industry's most scalable, multiprotocol switch for building high performance Grids ranging from tens to thousands of nodes. "We believe that grid computing is becoming the architecture of choice for computing in the enterprise," said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing at Voltaire. "The ability to efficiently share resources on-demand by virtualizing commodity servers, storage and networking resources is attractive to any business that wants to gain a competitive edge. Voltaire is committed to increasing the adoption of standards-based Grid technologies in the enterprise and thinks that the EGA is an important organization to be involved with as their focus is clear and targeted." The 451 Group The 451 Group is a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The company's analysts provide critical and timely emerging-technology insight to clients at vendor, investor, services and end-user organizations. The company has tracked the Grid computing technology market since 2000 -- producing more than 400 pieces of research on the implications of and opportunities for Grid computing in enterprise IT. It recently launched the 451 Grid Adoption Research Service (GARS) -- an investigation into user experiences and vendor strategies -- to extend its four years of proven expertise in analyzing the Grid technology market to look at early-stage adoption challenges and opportunities. "Grid computing is entering a new phase -- commercial adoption -- and what happens over the next two years will be crucial in terms of establishing technology frameworks that can foster Grid applications. That's why it's important -- from an industry perspective -- to dig in and understand the opportunities and challenges facing commercial implementations across various industries," said Martin V. McCarthy, chief executive officer of The 451 Group. "We are pleased to join EGA and help support its mission of creating infrastructure and guidance for the industry that accelerates commercialization."