Grid Meter » VC's Back Univa for Enterprise Grid Push

August 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)

VC's Back Univa for Enterprise Grid Push

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This morning, Grid start-up Univa announced that it has secured $8-million in funding (from ARCH Ventures, Appian Ventures, New World Ventures and OCA Ventures). Univa CEO, Steve Tuecke, was one of the original pioneers of the open source Globus Toolkit effort (along with Ian Foster out of Argonne National Lab, and Carl Kesselman out of ISI).

Univa is addressing the services and support requirements for enterprises building open source, open standards-based Grids. Red Hat proved that services and support for enterprise open source can be a profitable business -- and Univa hopes to replicate their success for the emerging enterprise Grid market. According to Univa COO, Rich Miller:

"Professional services will be very important to the uptake of Grid infrastructure. And, it's pretty easy to understand why. Grid infrastructure isn't something that comes ready-made. It's not a 'turnkey solution,' since almost every enterprise has a very unique collection of resources, a unique combination of applications that need to run on the infrastructure, and very different levels of performance or service levels that are acceptable.

Thus, for the foreseeable future, most implementations of Grid infrastructure will be consultative sales, and require the expertise of professional services to design and then implement the Grid infrastructure. Having once put Grid infrastructure in place, any enterprise which depends on that infrastructure will also demand that there be a high-quality level of technical support. No one wants to 'bet the company' on an infrastructure for which you can't find a 'mechanic.'

Why would someone tap Univa, a startup, for Globus-oriented services and support? Well, the founders of Univa are truly the inventors and the world experts in Globus. Working for our company are perhaps the most skilled people on the planet when it comes to understanding what Globus can and cannot do. We envision Univa's professional services to be sought out by leading enterprise users of Globus, particularly for the assessment, design, customization and integration of Globus components. We also expect to partner with the major systems vendors and professional services companies in executing and supporting the infrastructure for major projects."

Earlier this year, Univa announced its first three projects ... and later announced its first customer, Raytheon.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on August 22, 2005 07:58 AM

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