Real-time computing. Real-time news.
Blog: The Essence of 'On-Demand'
Keeping tabs on the trends making IT more agile and more efficient, from automation to virtualization.
The Essence of 'On-Demand' | Main Blog Index
March 17, 2008
Going Above and Beyond to Ensure Success
As I’ve noted before, some weeks simply have more news than others. This week was one of the others. However, that certainly doesn’t mean the news that was announced wasn’t interesting.
For example, we have news from GigaSpaces that it has added yet another financial institution to its list of customers. For a smaller company with limited marketing resources, one has to credit GigaSpaces for building a product both simple enough and advanced enough to make impressions with the financial firms it does reach. But it takes more than high technology to create a product that really resonates with your target audience. A company also must understand what its customers really need.
Which brings us to this week’s feature article about a solution that GigaSpaces developed Microsoft’s help to relieve traders from the crippling grips of their Excel-based desktop applications. You’ll learn all about it when you read the article itself, but the point I want to drive home is that GigaSpaces has demonstrated, to me at least, a clear understanding about what its customers need. While the company already has achieved a certain level of pervasiveness in financial datacenters, it noticed a particular pain point stemming from mountains of data and increasingly complex algorithms overmatching Excel-based applications on trading floor desktops, and it proactively sought out a solution.
Actually, this partnership reminds me of the recent partnership between Platform and IBM around Symphony for Cell-based BladeCenters, and hence serves as just the latest proof that successful IT vendors don’t rest on their laurels and hope their flagship products carry them to the promised land. Judging by the relative success of both Platform and GigaSpaces, the trick seems to be identifying every possible pain point or opening to squeeze in a competitive edge, and then expanding your portfolio to meet these specific needs.
For what it’s worth, GigaSpaces and Microsoft aren’t limiting their partnership to the Excel adapter. According to Microsoft Financial Services’ Stevan Vidich, the two companies also have done some work on the HPC front, where GigaSpaces XAP can be used to give compute nodes managed by either Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 or HPC Server 2008 access to a data grid. This is particularly beneficial, noted Vidich, when the volumes of messages be exchanged are large.
“It’s a very nice partnership because their product has touch points with Excel on the desktop, Excel on the server via Excel Services and SharePoint, and also our grid computing product, HPC Server 2008,” Vidich told me. “By touching multiple product lines and offering integration across multiple products, I think it will demonstrate that it’s a very valuable product to financial services customers.”
Another announcement that really caught my attention came from Tier1 Research, whose latest report revolves around the forces affecting transformation in the mass-market hosting space. We’ve been covering the hosting space more and more since providers really started taking advantage on the on-demand capabilities of virtualization last year, and this report cites virtualization as one of the factors threatening the dominance of dedicated hosting. I firmly believe this to be the case, and we’ll have an article next week that should illustrate this even more, as we look at two very different companies leveraging virtualization to offer the most flexible hosted services for their respective customer bases.
Elsewhere in the issue, be sure to check out: “ESA Leads Endeavor to Save Earth Science Data”; “OpenFabrics Alliance Releases Latest Enterprise Software”; “Open Source GridGain 2.0 Released”; “Appistry Launches Free Download Program”; “P2P Speeds Large Data Transfers Over Internet”; and “Sun, Microsoft Expand Investment in Interoperability.”
-----
Comments about GRIDtoday are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Derrick Harris, at editor@gridtoday.com.
Posted by Derrick Harris - March 17 @ 11:39AM
Sponsored Links
Derrick Harris
Derrick Harris is the Editor of On-Demand Enterprise
Recent Comments
What Did You Think by Omar Sultan
Cloud Computing: Bill of Rights (aka Ten Commandments) by samj
about vmware by faheem
Feature Articles
Network-Attached Memory: Virtualization for Java Environments
Network-attached memory is analogous to network-attached storage (NAS) in that it provides a service to thousands of connected clients transparently. As NAS is transparent underneath the file system, network-attached memory is transparent underneath the Java language. But in Terracotta’s network-attached memory pool, everything can be massively scaled out.
Read More...
Oracle Shifts Grid Focus to the Application
Oracle's newest candidate to solve some of IT Nation's biggest problems has now officially hit the campaign trail, and its name is WebLogic Application Grid. This new assemblage of software is meant to put grid capabilities at the foundation of an organization's computing operations by pooling IT resources and allocating them to workloads as needed. But this is one solution Oracle is not labeling "cloud computing."
Read More...
Cloud Computing and the Financial Crisis
A somewhat neglected aspect of the current financial crisis is the huge spike in trading volumes in recent days. In some cases, they have raised to more than double the average of the months (and years) that preceded the crisis. Systems, of course, don't care if stocks are going up or down; they just need to handle the transactions. Cloud computing can help ensure they meet this task.
Read More...
Top Headlines
Managing Servers in the Cloud
Oct 07 | ServerWatch | Managing server loads is a complex endeavor in any environment, and even more so when virtualization and cloud computing comes into play. Read more...
Q&A: Jonathan Bryce, Mosso
Oct 07 | Web Host Industry News | Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce discusses how Mosso's Hosting Cloud is helping YouDecide2008.com, a political blog and website, handle tremendous time-sensitive and election-related spikes in traffic. Read more...
Virtualisation Set to Drive SaaS Adoption
Oct 07 | vnunet | Three-quarters of organisations believe that server virtualisation will drive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS), according to new research released today by web hosting firm Hostway. Read more...
Peering Behind the Cloud
Oct 06 | Computerworld | If cloud computing will be mainstream in 2-5 years, as predicted by Gartner analysts, now may be a good time to try it out. Read more...
Verari Noses HP, IBM with Third Gen Blades
Oct 06 | The Register | Verari Systems has just updated its blade boxes to have a stronger appeal to enterprise customers. Read more...
Multimedia
Blogs by Topics
Blogs by Author
ODE Blogroll
- All Things Distributed
- Appistry Blog
- Dell - In the Clouds
- ElasticVapor
- GigaOm
- GigaOm
- GigaSpaces
- GigaSpaces
- Grid Gurus
- Grid Gurus
- GoGrid Blog
- High Scalability
- Ian Foster Blog
- Powers Unfiltered
- Serial to Parallel to Distributed
