Platform on track from grid to cloud; financial services will lead
With a new tagline 'the power of sharing,' Platform is emerging from an HPC cocoon with a corporate initiative to double down on internal cloud-computing opportunities with early adopters, both in FSI and elsewhere. VMware integration is just the opening salvo in connecting different worlds. While it's not mainstream yet, Platform's clear belief is that future datacenters will look like internal clouds. We are seeing grid teams with successful services, especially those established within the investment-banking operations of financial services groups, being charged with taking the utility model and applying it more broadly across the group. The idea is that the benefits enjoyed by these groups should be able to support other user constituencies, services and workloads – subsequently offering a wider benefit across the organization. Federating and extending grids to support retail banking is a frequently mentioned example. Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley are among those grid users we have looked at in our Grid Adoption Research Service.
