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Recently, Platform Computing announced its increased presence in China, including two big new research customers and an increased headcount in the country (see Platform Computing Drives Grid Adoption in China in March 7 issue of GRIDtoday). Here, Songnian Zhou, CEO and co-founder of Platform Computing, speaks with GRIDtoday editor Derrick Harris about, among other things, why China is such an important market and what verticals are driving Grid adoption.

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GRIDtoday: Can you talk a little about the selection of Platform by the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and the "863 Program?"

SONGNIAN ZHOU: SSC selected Platform software as the infrastructure for their ASP operation for computing services. SSC is the Shanghai Government's top priority infrastructure project for this year, with the aim of substantially boosting the computing capabilities available to researchers and industries in this rapidly developing industrial region in China.

The idea is to leapfrog the traditional IT industry model in which each enterprise builds and owns its own IT infrastructure and expertise. SSC is expected to deliver specialized computing capabilities, applications and expertise to organizations in the region as an open ASP. SSC partnered with Platform Computing to provide the ASP system infrastructure, including the Grid portal, for user access, workload processing capabilities, resource sharing policies to ensure SLA and security, data management and distribution between user sites and SSC, and charge-back accounting capabilities.

The entire system is in full production. SSC customers include GM Shanghai R&D Center, AVIC (Aviation Industry Corp. of China) and Baogang Steel Works. These are the undisputed leading organizations in their respective industries in China. The manufacturing industry is emerging as a major adopter of the ASP model.

The 863 Program is the flagship national high-tech R&D program supported by the Ministry of Science & Technology. Together with AVIC, Tsinhua University and the Aerospace University, Platform Computing is working on an 863 project aimed at developing a manufacturing Grid infrastructure for China's aerospace industry. The Chinese government has stated it wishes to establish the third major commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world.

In this project, we have successfully demonstrated cross-site sharing of servers, application software licenses and design data across multiple security domains. This Grid computing infrastructure is expected to be a critical enabler to the requisite collaboration among numerous R&D centers and manufacturing sites. Such collaboration is critical to putting together thousands of electronic parts that have to work together on the first assembly and flight of a modern jet airliner. The underpinning infrastructure technology of this manufacturing Grid is based on Platform software products.


Gt: Why is China such an important region for Platform? What is the market like for Grid vendors there?

ZHOU: China is the fastest-growing market for Platform Computing worldwide. After staging the largest transportation buildup and largest telecommunication infrastructure buildup in history, the government and various industries in China have targeted IT to be the next major infrastructure effort.

This decision is based on positive economic growth enabled by infrastructure investment, and is in line with the country's desire to leverage economic globalization as well as elevate the value-add of its industries. In addition, rapidly escalating domestic demand is also driving industry growth. In this context, there is escalating recognition in China that Grid computing has the potential to accelerate its IT infrastructure and thus propel rapid industrial growth, repeating China's success in telecommunications. Examples include projects like the University Compass Grid, National Grid and Shanghai City Grid. There is a strong desire to avoid the IT evolution path followed by the industrialized countries through Client/Server, with a preference instead to move rapidly to a distributed/shared IT infrastructure. Platform Computing sees tremendous opportunity in China and we have been investing since 1997 to be the Grid market leader in China.


Gt: How does the Grid market in China stack up against other areas?

ZHOU: The Grid market in China parallels the country's adoption of IT -- relatively early stage, uneven, large-scale and poised for rapid growth. I expect the Grid market growth in China will parallel the country's economic growth, but at a faster pace than general IT growth, which is the highest among large economies around the world. The lack of legacy siloed IT infrastructure combined with strong demand for business growth suggests strong adoption of new technologies such as Grid. This has been our experience over the past years.


Gt: Aside from the work with the SSC and 863 Program, what other steps is Platform taking to expand its presence in China?

ZHOU: These projects are part of Platform's drive to develop the Grid computing market along verticals and corresponding applications. We are forming partnerships with other IT providers and key early adopters to establish production Grid solutions. We are collaborating with leading Chinese universities on Grid research and technology training. We are also collaborating with partners like IBM.


Gt: Moving on, IDC's prediction that the Grid market will reach $13 billion by 2007 is repeated a lot, as is Insight's claim that the market will reach $19.2 billion by 2010. How accurate do you feel these numbers are, and why?

ZHOU: I am not familiar with the specific methodologies involved to forecast the Grid market, but it is clear to those watching the market that Grid is gaining traction worldwide. I still think there are roadblocks, such as industry standards and application integration, but the industry is working on this as demands increase for more application integration. This means the momentum for Grid will continue to increase.


Gt: Where does Platform fit into these predictions? What role or position do you foresee the company having in 2010?

ZHOU: I believe that Platform's Grid computing solutions will continue to provide the foundation for what has been hailed as the next generation of IT that is transforming the world of computing as we now know it. Grid is also a foundation for emerging business models like utility computing and services oriented architecture (SOA). We will see more and more enterprise Grid adoption as companies across business silos and geographies recognize the ability to "plug in" to the power of vast computing resources available to them throughout the world and whenever that power is needed. Collaboration is also playing an increasingly vital role in leveraging geographically dispersed compute resources to address high performance computing requirements and, as business applications become Grid-enabled, business computing requirements as well. We'll continue to partner with key industry players to drive the growth of enterprise Grid computing in several vertical industries.


Gt: In your estimation, does Platform have more academic/research or enterprise customers?

ZHOU: Platform has over 1,700 Fortune 2000 customers around the world including clients across the financial, industrial manufacturing and electronics sectors. But we are absolutely seeing Grid moving beyond the academic/research world and into business computing scenarios, such as financial services. Platform's three commercial verticals -- financial services, manufacturing and electronics -- all have heavy, compute-intensive needs. In addition, there is also a demand from customers to see enterprise applications running on a Grid infrastructure. We are seeing this happen in the financial services vertical and with our customers like JPMorgan Chase, Sal Oppenheim and Societe Generale.


Gt: What do you see as the timeframe for Grid computing to reach widespread adoption in the enterprise?

ZHOU: A Grid solution must successfully address enterprise concerns relating to issues such as resource sharing, departmental chargeback and service level agreements (SLAs). Only when these issues are addressed will Grid computing see widespread adoption in the enterprise. In addition, we see cultural, resource sharing, standards and Grid-enabling applications as key areas that will facilitate adoption.

Gaining mindshare for Grid internally and overcoming what we call "the politics of Grid" is one of the biggest problems. Over time, silos have been created within the enterprise, in areas such as engineering, productions and operations, that are based on application provisioning. People are afraid that if they try to share their compute power, they will lose priority with their projects, or they will lose control over resources, and their budget will be affected. However, by implementing Grid computing technologies, policy-based scheduling, charge back accounting for better cost management, etc. are suddenly a reality.

Standards are also crucial in order to achieve an open technology that does not become proprietary to any one company. To bring benefits to companies, it is important to maintain open standards. As common Grid services and interoperable components emerge, the difficulty in undertaking these large-scale efforts will be greatly reduced and, as importantly, the resulting systems will better support interoperation.

Finally, I think the true value of Grid computing lies in its impact on key applications. From our recent survey of business and IT executives, it is clear that organizations are starting to apply the expected value of Grid computing to their most critical systems and processes. There are very few applications that organizations would not want to run on a Grid infrastructure. IT and business executives will expect ISVs to provide integrated, standards-based solutions that are capable of running in a heterogeneous environment of distributed hardware and software virtualized on a Grid infrastructure. In short, applications may need to be re-architected so that they can be Grid-enabled.


Gt: What kind of work is Platform doing to advance industry standards for enterprise Grid applications?

ZHOU: Platform is absolutely committed to standards. Platform currently channels its efforts through GGF. We actively participate in defining, contributing to and supporting standards. Standards are a pre-requisite to adoption of Grid computing. Demand for standardization will drive the market. ISVs will be hard pressed to resource support for multiple Grid infrastructures. Rather, a standard API will enable ISVs to more effectively support Grid.


Gt: I am wondering how long you have been involved in Grid computing, and how its current state compares to any predictions you might have made when Grid was in its infancy?

ZHOU: In 1987, while working on my doctorate, I came to realize the need to share resources and my vision of distributed computing and Platform Computing was born. We foresaw a time when companies would farm out sophisticated computing tasks to hundreds or even thousands of computers linked via the Internet or private networks. Beyond this distributed computing technology concept, we saw the need for software to manage these compute farms and data centers to ensure that extremely heavy and complex computing loads were shared between computing resources in the most efficient way, enabling improved productivity, faster time-to-market for products and competitive advantage.

Platform Computing has been focused specifically on the challenge of what we term "Enterprise Grid," and it is this focus and holistic approach that drives our vision and product roadmaps distinguishes us from our competitors. Today, we have several global customers who have deployed our technology to link geographically dispersed Grids, allowing them a virtualized view of their global Grid computing infrastructure and the ability to shift workloads around the globe for processing to maximize flexibility and harness virtually all available CPU cycles in their environment.


Gt: Is there anything else you would like to add?

ZHOU: This past fiscal year, Platform experienced substantial and continued growth throughout the company, allowing us to open new markets, attract major brand name customers, and develop strategic partnerships. As we look into the next year and beyond, we feel that Platform is poised to continue its growth and broaden its market leadership and global presence in all sectors and industries. We look forward to expanding our 12-year history of leadership and innovation in the Grid computing industry.