Platform Computing

IBM Buys System Software Company Platform Computing

October 12, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM yesterday announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Platform Computing, a privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Platform Computing offers cluster and grid management software for distributed computing environments.

The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Platform Computing management software helps clients create, integrate and manage shared computing environments that are used in resource-intensive applications such as simulations, computer modeling and analytics. These technical and high performance computing (HPC) applications fuel product development, critical business decisions and breakthrough science in financial services, manufacturing, digital media, oil and gas, life sciences, government, and research and education.

Platform Computing currently serves over 2,000 clients including 23 of the top 30 largest global enterprises. Example customers include CERN, Citigroup, Infineon, Pratt & Whitney, Red Bull Racing, Sanger Institute, Statoil and University of Tokyo.

Platform Computing’s operations as of the closing will be integrated into IBM Systems and Technology Group.

Platform Computing has approximately 500 employees worldwide.

Platform Computing Debuts Software Product For Private Cloud Management

June 22, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Platform Computing today announced a new software product for managing private cloud environments from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Conference in New York City. Platform ISF is the first end-to-end cloud management product for enterprises to build and run their private clouds. It is the centerpiece of Platform’s cloud strategy and will be made available for beta in June with general availability planned for the Fall.

Platform Computing is expanding its product offerings to support the needs of mainstream business applications, leveraging its strong technology and experience in deploying large-scale shared compute environments. Platform ISF is computing infrastructure sharing software for private cloud management. Private clouds generally refer to resources pooled together in a shared IT infrastructure to run applications for business users. Platform ISF creates private clouds from physical and virtual resources, delivering application environments according to workload and resource scheduling policies. It incorporates Platform’s production-proven resource sharing technology (EGO) and virtual machine orchestrator (VMO) and includes capabilities for self-service, service-offering definition, contracts, reporting and billing. Private clouds deployed through Platform ISF allow IT departments to be more responsive to the needs of the enterprise by offering IT as services on a pay-per-use basis. This new computing paradigm is expected to drastically reduce the costs of IT as resource utilization levels increase due to resource sharing.

Platform ISF is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. It also supports third-party system management tools for security and provisioning. This allows organizations to leverage existing resources while conforming to corporate standards. It does so while supporting

IT’s obligation to oversee corporate requirements, including governance, compliance, business continuity, and cost and risk management. While public clouds can offer infrastructure and computer resources on a pay-per-use basis, most of the benefits of cloud computing are not realized by enterprises through the use of public clouds alone. Private clouds can leverage both internal and public cloud resources. Platform ISF acts as the management layer for pulling resources into a unified environment and its value is independent of location or ownership of resources.

Platform Computing Releases VM Orchestrator 4

August 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Platform Computing has announced the next version of its virtual environment management product for the enterprise data center, Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) 4. Platform VMO 4 provides faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability, and power consumption, to improve an enterprise’s return on investment from its virtualization environment. The solution offers a cost-effective enterprise virtualization management solution for Citrix XenServer, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors to be delivered in the coming months.

Platform says VMO 4 increases IT productivity and responsiveness to business service levels through a Self-Service portal that supports delegated administration and allows end users to request and control usage of their own VMs without administrator involvement. At the core of VMO’s automated management is the multi-host dynamic resource management engine, which increases resource utilization across the virtual environment to remove bottlenecks and server silos according to flexible configurable policies that map to business priorities.

Platform VMO 4 will be available later this month.

Platform Computing