IBM Extends Leadership with New Solutions

GridWorld -- Further extending its leadership in the Grid computing market, IBM announced today that Higo Bank and UniCredit are the newest businesses to deploy Grid computing solutions based on IBM technology.

In addition to the financial institutions, IBM announced an expansion of the IBM Grid and Grow offering, with participation by SAS and Absoft Corporation, as well as the introduction of a new Ready for Grid Computing program.

IBM currently has major, ongoing Grid computing projects around the world that enable customers to analyze the value of an investment portfolio in minutes rather than hours, unite global research teams to take advantage of the most up-to-date information, significantly accelerate drug discovery process, cut the design time of product, reduce the instances of defects, and scale businesses to meet cyclical demand.

IBM also announced SAS as the newest ISV to join its Grid and Grow Offering, launched last August at LinuxWorld. The IBM Grid and Grow offering is a powerful solution designed to help customers get started with Grid computing.

SAS has also committed to participate in IBM's Ready for Grid computing program, which validates that an application is capable of executing and realizing benefits from running in a Grid computing environment.

"Since becoming the first enterprise business intelligence vendor to join the Global Grid Forum in 2003, SAS has continued to invest in enhancing our Grid computing capabilities to meet customer needs for increased scalability and faster results," said Keith Collins, chief technology officer at SAS.

Also today, Absoft Corporation, a leading provider of high performance software development tools, announced that its High Performance Computing Software Development Kit (HPC SDK) has been designed for IBM's new Grid and Grow cluster hardware.

In a separate announcement, IBM and Univa Corporation also jointly agreed to deliver an enterprise-ready release of the open-standards based Globus Toolkit on IBM platforms.