Grid Meter » Platform - Interesting Grid Vendor to Watch in '06

January 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Platform - Interesting Grid Vendor to Watch in '06

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Back in 1993 -- in an interview with Computerworld ("Sharing Software Ekes More Life Out of Older Unix Boxes") -- Platform CEO Songnian Zhou introduced his company's Load Sharing Facility (LSF) breakthrough as "a network operating system that makes it easier to share compute resources across a heterogeneous Unix network." Today, Platform's LSF has become the most widely used job scheduler in enterprise Grid production (Linux and Unix) environments.

Platform wrapped up '05 with the release of the Enterprise Grid Orchestrator -- a new platform for the integration and management of heterogeneous resources in a Grid environment. 2006 should be a very interesting year for the Toronto-based company, which partnered with Microsoft for LSF to offer some key functionality in the Windows Compute Cluster Server release next year.

As a company, Platform has received zero dollars in venture funding through the years -- every dollar has been derived from customer sales, according to Zhou, who sees a number of factors today that indicate a quickly maturing Grid industry.

"The killer app for grid is not the components of applications -- ERP, CRM -- but the connection of all of these components of enterprise applications to form business processes," says Zhou. "Industry analysts are consistently saying that in order to support SOA as the architecture for applications, you need a 'service oriented infrastructure.' So how do you provide this service-oriented infrastructure to deliver resources where and when needed, based on cost and demand rather than just fixed assets? The Grid provides a very solid set of core technologies for SOI."

Platform is looking beyond the traditional Grid application set. However, instead of simply looking down another alley they are thinking in terms of application aggregation, the commonalities that exist between different application sets and where this all comes together. This type of thinking is going to be critical in the coming year.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 4, 2006 08:20 PM

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