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Grid Market Expansion and Emergence of Cluster Server
It is a time of change; a growing time. This is an exciting time for the HPC, cluster computing, and Grid market. Adoption in the traditional vertical markets is maturing and entrenched. Cluster and Grid technologies are now "must-haves" for industries such as Electronics, Manufacturing, Life Sciences, Government/Research/Education, and Oil & Gas. Financial Services are experiencing rapid adoption of Grid in investment banking. Tremendous business value is being derived from cluster and Grid technologies. The horizontal business computing market is starting to link Grid with virtualization and SOA to transform the whole data center architecture from Client/Server silos.
In this context, a number of niche software players are having difficulties sustaining the value of their point products for a narrow set of customers or one target vertical. HPC customers have moved onto enterprise adoption of a variety of products including workload management, reporting and analysis, cluster management, distributed data management, and application integration. High quality technical support and services on a global basis is of increasing value as the dependency of users' business upon Grid escalates.
In parallel, the market is broadening and reaching down to the basic server level. For years, I have been using the term Cluster Server for the next generation of servers after mainframes and expensive SMPs. A Cluster Server is a cluster of commodity server boxes packaged together with a layer of systems software and used just as an SMP server. The pieces of Grid software I mentioned above need to be "shrink wrapped" for this tightly coupled cluster and loaded at IHV's factories to dramatically simplify the user experience with cluster computing. Instead, the users "build", and they buy a Cluster Server from an IHV of their choice. The defining feature of this Cluster Server is pre-integrated, commercially supported standards-based cluster software stack at low cost.
As Platform embarks upon its 15th year of providing exceptional value to you, our customers and partners, we celebrate the early adopters of this mega trend in the IT infrastructure. Platform is the largest and most established software vendor for cluster and Grid. This uniquely positions us to deliver on evolving market expectations. Platform is expanding the adoption of Enterprise Grid across vertical markets and leading in the formation of the Cluster Server market with our ecosystems partners. Since 1992, Platform has been a profitable and growing company and this year has been no exception. We are very excited about what the future will bring. Stay tuned for exciting announcements in the coming months!
May 23rd, 2007
Dr. Songnian Zhou,
CEO, Platform Computing
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