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Friday, February 24, 2006

Mechanical Turk - A Grid of People

www.mturk.com Grid computing meets Wetware ...

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen’s "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet’s doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo-code below illustrates how simple this can be.

read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}

3Par - Serving Information - Utility Intelligent Storage

www.3par.com 3PAR is the leading provider of Utility Storage, a simple, efficient and scalable tiered-storage array for utility computing that lets customers serve more with less. 3PAR Utility Storage can cut an organization's Total Cost of Data by 50%. Capacity purchases and related costs can be cut up to 75% while storage administration and associated expenses can be reduced up to 90%.

3PAR Utility Storage is ideal for open systems storage consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management and performance-intensive applications. Well positioned with key strategic investors including Oracle, Sun, and VERITAS, 3PAR has been operating successfully for the past six years and has been serving enterprise customers since 2002.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

RatchetSoft - Service Oriented Mass Customization

www.rachetsoft.com Can web services usher-in a collaborative development process? RachetSoft thinks so.

TeamSOA - Leading the SOA Initiative

www.teamsoa.com In September 2004, the San Diego-based Research and Development wing of Blue Titan, Inc. broke off to form their own Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) consulting boutique, named appropriately, TeamSOA. Since its inception, the team has been providing both SOA and Web services knowledge and implementation expertise for several key clients, including Accredited Home Lenders, Rotech Medical, and UC Irvine.

Forum Systems - The Leader in Web Services Security

www.forumsys.com Forum Systems is the leader in Web services and SOA security with a comprehensive suite of Trust Management, Threat Protection and Information Assurance solutions for the Automated Web. Forum Systems flexible hardware, software and embedded products make vibrant business communications possible by actively protecting XML data and Web services across networks and business boundaries.

As businesses move more of their critical transactions across the Internet, they face a significant security challenge: how to guarantee the protection of business-critical information over increasingly complex trading relationships.

* Forum Systems enables our customers to efficiently share and secure sensitive information across the extended enterprise.
* Forum Systems offers enterprises and government agencies a comprehensive suite of XML-Sentient content security infrastructure that actively guards information as it moves between and within enterprises - at the origin, during transmission, and after it reaches its destination.

Today, more than ever, companies must address both the trust and threat sides of Web services security.

Trust vs. Threat

Forum Systems believes that just because you may trust a system, machine or user, it does not mean they have good intentions - Web services security is a two part equation that takes into account issues around Trust and Threat. Using this simple yet powerful philosophy Forum Systems has developed a comprehensive suite of content security products that offer Threat Protection as well as Trust Management solutions.

Kenai Systems - Pre-Empting Web Services Vulnerabilities

www.kenaisystems.com At Kenai Systems, our mission is to provide highly efficient Vulnerability Assessment and Management solutions that enable businesses to securely develop, deploy, and benefit from Web services and SOA. By addressing vulnerabilities in every stage of the Web services life-cycle (development, testing, deployment, and maintenance), our solutions will enable businesses to realize the important strategic and financial benefits of Web services, without compromising their network security or increasing their security management costs.

The Kenai eXamine product family is the first policy-driven automated security and policy compliance testing solution for enterprises developing and deploying SOA solutions based on SOAP-compliant Web services.

eXamineX, eXamineSO, and eXamineSOA Enterpris are Point, Click, and Protect solutions that enable enterprises to gain visibility into the risks and security exposures of their SOA services, and to build security and policy compliance into new services before they reach production.

Kenai Systems was founded in April, 2004, by a management team with extensive experience in network security and Web services. The privately held company is based in Rocklin, California, just east of Sacramento. The Rocklin / Roseville area is one of the fastest growing technology and business corridors in the country, with significant operations of HP, NEC, Agilent, Verifone, TASQ and numerous other technology and VC-backed companies.

Partnering also with StrikeIron.

mFoundry - The smartest way to mobilize a business

www.mfoundry.com Founded in 2003 by Drew Sievers and Rodney Aiglstorfer, mFoundry started with a vision of finding a better alternative to the conventional approach to mobile application development. Before starting mFoundry, Drew was President of Semaphore Partners—the Publicis network's interactive offering—and Rodney was its National Director of Technology. As the enormous potential of mobile technology became apparent, Semaphore Partners began fielding client requests for mobile application development. Drew and Rodney quickly became dissatisfied with the limitations hindering the easy creation and deployment of mobile applications and were convinced that a better solution was needed. They left their positions at Semaphore and established mFoundry to solve the problem.

The solution is the mWorks™ platform. The mWorks platform finally gives companies a turnkey way to leverage mobile applications across a wide array of mobile devices. mWorks provides the easiest, fastest, most cost-effective way to create, deploy, and manage mobile applications and eliminates the limitations inherent in other approaches.

Today, mFoundry uses mWorks to help marketers, agencies, content providers, developers and other partners leverage the power of mobile applications. mFoundry is headquartered in Sausalito, California.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Intalio - BPMS

www.intalio.com I first met Ismael Ghalimi in 1999 after he had created exolab.org and founded Intalio.com. We sat down and decided the name for the standards effort BPMI.org. That led to BPML, and to BPEL. Today, Intalio is the best BPMS, and now supports BPMN also developed by BPMI.org. BPMI.org itself has been sold off to the OMG who have plans for BPM themselves. The next era of innovation, variously called BPM 2.0 or BPMS Phase 2 has began. The innovators in that new space will include Intalio, but others have now seen the potential of zero-code, one click, design driven process architecture at massive scale. Watch this space. Computer Sciences Corporation's book, Business Process Management: The Third Wave, tells the story.

AcceptSoftware - Roadmap to market success

www.acceptsoftware.com Accept Software provides the leading turnkey solution for product planning and delivery for any company that has to manage complexity in its portfolio and product planning, product development and launch activities. Our product – Accept 360° – is a comprehensive solution that unites all stakeholders, processes, and data that are critical to delivering winning products.

Accept 360° - Platform for Product Delivery

Accept 360° is an information management and decision support platform that can be used by every participant throughout the product lifecycle to define product strategies, translate these strategies into tactical plans, and then execute to plan while continuing to respond to ever-changing market and customer conditions.

Accept 360° achieves all this by providing an easy-to-use, rich collaborative environment that:

* Encourages knowledge sharing
* Creates a single unified repository that models all of the critical factors and dependencies affecting successful product delivery
* Provides decision support tools that present information in context to help ensure effective decision-making

Accept Software was founded in 2002 and maintains its headquarters in Fremont, CA. Our flagship product, Accept 360°, is used by leading product and service companies throughout the world to deliver market-leading products. Accept has production customers from start-ups to the Global 2000, in a variety of industries from software and electronics to transportation and business services.

Borland Caliber - Enterprise Requirements Management

www.borland.com/us/products/caliber/ Designed to capture and manage business, process, technical, functional, and operational requirements, CaliberRM enables stakeholders across the organization to collaborate effectively so that projects are delivered on time, within budget, and to specification.

Using CaliberRM to define, prioritize, and track requirements throughout the project lifecycle, software development teams are able to respond rapidly to ever-changing requirements without jeopardizing project success.

Powerful estimation capabilities take project planning and impact analysis to a new level, helping organizations optimize the software delivery process by delivering projects with greater predictability and control.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Alignent - Roadmap the future

www.alignent.com Technology Roadmapping aligns technologies to product performance requirements, identifies required long-term technology and capability investments, captures potential disruptive technologies and aligns supply chain and partnerships to create more efficient environments.

Roadmaps link business unit with technology enabling companies to achieve technical competency in advance of actual product needs improving product rollouts which is a key element in planning strategic business initiatives.

Today, organizations across the globe are using Alignent's Vision Strategist software to trace technology maturity and standards and to identify technology and process development activities that will deliver the right product and service capabilities.

Sophos - Email Security Appliance

www.sophos.com Compact and easy-to-manage, the ES4000 Email Security Appliance delivers high-capacity, high-availability security for enterprise email networks. It features advanced threat detection, built-in redundancy, remote heartbeat monitoring, and the most intuitive web-based management console available.

Stellent - Universal Content Management

www.stellent.com Stellent is a global provider of content management software solutions that drive rapid success for customers by enabling fast implementations and generating quick, broad user adoption. Stellent Universal Content Management enables customers to rapidly deploy line-of-business applications as well as content management solutions for enterprise initiatives such as enterprise portals and business commerce applications.

More than 4,500 customers worldwide — including Procter & Gamble, Merrill Lynch, Los Angeles County, The Home Depot, British Red Cross, ING, Georgia Pacific, Bayer Corp., Coca-Cola FEMSA, Emerson Process Management and Genzyme Corp. — have selected Stellent solutions to power their content-centric business applications. Stellent is headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn. and maintains offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

The company has announced a new strategy enabling customers to better manage wikis and blogs within their corporate environments. A wiki is a Web site encouraging collaborative writing of content through collective authoring and massive linking to new or existing pages within a wiki or other site. A blog is a Web site facilitating informal discussions on specific topics through author postings/commentary and reader feedback.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Magic Software - Composite Apps, EAI and BPM

www.magicsoftware.com Magic Software Enterprises (MSE) is a globally recognized provider of business-driven tools for rapid, simplified Application Development and Deployment and Enterprise Application Integration - used with complete confidence by mid-size and large corporations, software developers, and system integrators around the world.

As a global player in the software industry, Magic Software has representation in more than 40 countries. Among the company's 600 employees around the world are over 170 skilled experts involved in the ongoing research and development of current and future technologies.

Customers and partners include thousands of ISVs, System Integrators, and Corporations worldwide, who are supported by Magic's extensive - and uniquely responsive - global service organization.

Magic Software is a subsidiary of Formula Systems Ltd., a global information technology company primarily engaged, through its subsidiaries and affiliates, in providing software consulting services, developing proprietary software products, and supplying computer-based business solutions.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Identify - Accelerating Application Problem Resolution

www.identify.com Founded in 1996, Identify Software is the leader in Application Problem Resolution (APR) software. The company's AppSight Application Problem Resolution System is used by enterprises and independent software and system vendors (ISVs) to automate and dramatically accelerate their problem resolution processes across the application lifecycle in order to increase application availability and quality, reduce support costs, and accelerate product releases. AppSight is the first and only, comprehensive solution for application problem resolution across the application lifecycle, with an architecture uniquely designed from the ground up to optimize the process of resolving problems.

Identify is one of the fastest growing software companies in the general Application Management space.

The company maintains its operational headquarters in New York, with R&D based in Identify's AppSight Problem Resolution System provides a comprehensive lifecycle problem resolution solution—as such, it generally belongs in the Application Lifecycle Management and Application Management market spaces.

AppSight is a system built on a unique problem resolution architecture that was designed from the ground up with proprietary Black Box technology to optimize the problem resolution process.

* Optimizes the problem resolution process by automating the capture of all problem information, eliminating the need to reproduce the problem and its environment, accelerates root cause analysis by removing the iterative trial and error steps inherent in manual approaches
* Enables collaboration across the application lifecycle among all organizations involved in the problem resolution process (Development, Test/QA, and Support)
* Supports all application architectures (client/server, Web, etc.) across heterogeneous environments (.NET, J2EE, Windows) to provide complete coverage of your application portfolio
* Provides a purpose-built interface that automates the tasks performed by teams that participate in the problem resolution process (Level 1 Support, Level 2 Support, Development, and Testing)
* Can be used to diagnose the root cause of any application behavior (problem)

AppSight has a No-Barrier licensing model that ensures complete coverage of large-scale production environments on clients and servers, as well as remote customer locations, through no cost Black Box distribution

Identify Software’s AppSight is used by some of the world’s top IT service providers, outsourcing firms, systems integrators, and IT consultants to resolve software application problems up to 80% faster. They report benefits across the application lifecycle—accelerated application delivery, shorter test cycles, improved product quality, reduced support costs, and improved application availability and performance.

With comprehensive problem analysis capabilities and cross-platform support for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft .NET, and J2EE environments, Identify's AppSight has set the industry standard for a complete solution for application problem resolution.

Benefits for providers throughout the service lifecycle

Bidding and capture phase:

* Deep application insight provides fast knowledge acquisition for more competitive bids and achievable Service Definition Policies and SLAs

Application development phase:

* Accelerate project cycles with higher quality results during design, coding, testing
* Embedding AppSight Black Box into released code creates a mechanism for rich communication of problem data from the enterprise’s environment back to the service provider, without having to rely on end-user recollections

Relationship management & customer care phase:

* Service Provisioning: Deep application insight provides fast knowledge acquisition for more competitive bids and achievable Service Definition Policies and SLAs
* Service Activation: Problem capture and rapid root cause analysis enables quick start application support with lower project start-up costs
* Service Assurance: Problem capture and rapid root cause analysis enable SLA compliance on availability, functionality, and performance, throughout the project life, despite team turnover
* Change Management: Rapid recovery from deployment glitches
* Service Retirement: Application insight leaves client with knowledge asset

Monday, February 06, 2006

Orbeon - Form-based Web applications

www.orbeon.com Orbeon is an XML Services Company providing XML training and XML consulting, as well as professional production support for Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS), our open-source product. Since our inception in 1999, Orbeon has focused on providing custom application development and advanced system integration services to Global 1000 companies. Orbeon delivers solutions that require sophisticated software capable of integrating advanced business functionality with our clients' existing assets. We consistently succeed by following repeatable agile methodologies as well as proven open source projects. We use standard Xforms to Ajax-enable your form-bsaed web applications and make them user-friendly and simpler to create.

SkyWay Software - Accelerate Solution Delivery

www.skywaysoftware.com Will development environments for accelerating the development of Web services and SOA catch on? This is what Skyway say:

Skyway’s team has a successful history of developing proven industry winners. Skyway’s principal investor, Daniel Aegerter, and CEO, Jared Rodriguez, were the founding partners of TRADEX Technologies, which was acquired by Ariba in 2000 for $5.4 billion. As they did with TRADEX Technologies and since the Skyway Software formation in 2001, the Skyway team focuses its research on developing solutions that enable companies to realize the business-value-promise from their investments in technology. For Skyway Software, the technology investment is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The business value promises are lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) to develop and operate business applications and increasing application agility to enable businesses to quickly adapt and respond to changing market conditions and technology advances.

AmberPoint - SOA Runtime Governance Solutions

www.amberpoint.com Founded in 2001 with significant venture backing from Crosslink Capital, Norwest and Sutter Hill, we're a fast-growing startup with a vision for market requirements and significant customer traction. Our prominent executives and experienced developers bring impressive records of success from such leading software companies as Sun, Forte, IBM, webMethods, Oracle, Ingres and Sybase.

Our team has a great deal of experience at pioneering new technologies for distributed systems, databases, development tools and management frameworks. We're now applying that experience to the open standards of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA and Web Services) to deliver solutions for making services-based systems production-ready, business-ready and easily manageable.

We’ve grown quickly to become the industry-leading provider of SOA visibility, management and security software. AmberPoint leads the market in the number of software licenses, paid customers and customers in production. AmberPoint software is used in 63 countries spanning six continents around the globe. And we’re closely aligned with the leading platform providers and systems integrators to help organizations worldwide realize the benefits of the new, standards-based application architecture.

CXO Systems - Real time visibility via dashboards

www.cxosystems.com CXO Systems delivers software solutions that give business executives right-time views of their key risk and performance indicators to run their business more efficiently and profitably. In the past, this was a challenging and expensive proposition, particularly for dynamic companies with time sensitive and event based information needs, where change in events, operations and organizational structure is constant. The difficulty attaining these views stems from the fact that the underlying business information and the associated intelligence is distributed across the enterprise, scattered over disparate systems and processes, constantly changing in time and to a large extent hidden from the view of executives. We call this problem the Visibility Problem.

CXO Systems helps to solve the Visibility problem by providing consolidated business information in the form of real-time business visibility dashboards. CXO Systems fills the gap between the information available in backend systems, data flowing on top of the Network, and the real-time information needed from external and desktop files.

Tideway Systems - Total IT Transparency

www.tideway.com (BTM - business technology management) Tideway was founded to provide the tools today’s enterprises need to allow IT to run like a business by providing the complete and authoritative source of operational IT intelligence. To run IT like a business, IT managers need to implement repeatable, automated processes across their organisations. They also need up-to-date and reliable management data to allow them to plan, execute and measure progress. Some of the key data required includes

* A clear understanding of the operational capabilities of their IT organisation (both from personnel and technology perspectives)
* The requirements of the business
* The key outputs of IT (generally the business applications, services and SLAs)

However, most organisations have a poor understanding of how IT infrastructure supports the business, with the knock-on effect that there is limited or no understanding of the cost to deliver specific business applications.

This is vital to managing IT like a business, as what gets measured gets done. Measurement data has to be stable, reliable and meaningful, yet despite the massive investment that organisations have made into IT management products, the data is still:

* Expensively, manually gathered
* Shallow – only containing basic asset information
* Of poor data quality – typically less that 50% correctly registered
* Out-of-date, and therefore obsolete almost instantly, especially in environments with a high rate of change
* Poorly organized - not normalized across technologies, with no understanding of depedencies, and therefore not actionable
* Of low relevance - the data is typically presented as an accounting view for financial asset management, rather than a management view.

As a result, IT processes are suboptimal, and consume precious time and resource that should be spent innovating for the business. Tideway’s product - Foundation - focuses on providing an up-to-date trusted view of exactly how components of the IT infrastructure support the business across all technology layers. Tideway Foundation’s data:

* Is automatically gathered (zero-touch inventory)
* Is deep (collects hundreds of data points per server)
* Has excellent data quality (100% accuracy)
* Is always up-to-date (manages environments of over 45,000 servers)
* Understands dependencies between components of IT

As, at the top level, Tideway Foundation models IT from the perspective of business applications and services, down through all technology layers, it is now possible to manage SLAs, Charge Back and Compliance from the perspective of the customer – the business user community, and make the value that IT delivers totally transparent.

IT processes can finally be optimised and automated, and IT can focus not on firefighting, tactical projects and ‘keeping the lights on’, but instead on delivering innovation to the business to help build true sustainable competitive advantage. Tideway has developed methodologies to allow our customers to achieve this vision in a managed and sustainable way, delivering tangible and measurable value at each step of the process. See Tideway’s Configuration Management Maturity Levels Model for more details.

Friday, February 03, 2006

United Devices - Grid Computing Solutions

www.ud.com United Devices is the market leader in enterprise grid solutions, delivering dynamic application infrastructures for businesses of all sizes in a variety of industries.

UD offers comprehensive grid and infrastructure management software and services to enable the virtualization of applications across all areas of the business. We help organizations build enterprise grid infrastructures and develop centralized grid service offerings to optimize application workflow at dramatically reduced costs.

Innovative Solutions
UD solutions optimize an organization's existing resources (including clusters, servers and desktops) to create an enterprise-wide capacity on-demand environment to maximize application performance and license utilization for both business side and HPC applications.

Our products include the flagship Grid MP platform, which creates a dynamic virtual infrastructure to transform existing systems, storage, and networks into a powerful on-demand resource. Grid MP enables any organization to coordinate and share existing applications across complex, geographically dispersed enterprises.

We also offer the leading enterprise meta-scheduling solution MP Synergy for virtualized control over the entire HPC infrastructure. With MP Synergy, organizations can manage job scheduling using Grid MP and also across heterogeneous, widely distributed resources - including clusters operated by 3rd party tools like LSF and PBS, dedicated servers, and non-dedicated desktop resources.

And with MP Insight, our capacity management and reporting solution, companies can measure, report on and analyze their entire infrastructure's capacity and utilization in order to make more cost-effective planning and spending decisions.

Real Business Value
Our customers use UD solutions to solve high-priority challenges - and deliver real value to the business. Key differentiators include:

* Robust application framework
* Enterprise scalability
* Infrastructure virtualization
* World-class security and manageability
* Affordable pricing

Benefits include:

* Improved Application performance / robustness
* Reduced time to market / quicker ROI
* Enhanced work capabilities / scope
* Reduced infrastructure spending
* Better utilization of existing investments (ROIC)
* Enhanced resource-sharing across organizations
* Maximized commercial application license utilization

ITM-Software - Managing the business of IT

www.itm-software.com (BTM business technology management) ITM Software has a single goal and focus – support the success of CIOs. ITM Software provides software products and management expertise that helps CIOs establish themselves as business leaders and excel in the role of the General Manager of the IT function.

The company's unique combination of software products and management expertise enables CIOs to drive down IT costs, deliver more business value, and support the increasingly rapid pace of business demands.

ITM Software provides CIOs and IT leaders with software products and management expertise that advance the business management of Information Technology. The company has a single focus on serving the business management needs of IT organizations. Lead by ex-CIOs and IT leaders, ITM Software possesses a unique perspective on the management challenges facing today's CIOs. This experience base, combined with a world-class software development team, translates into products and best-practice expertise that bring a business-centric approach to managing IT.

The ITM Business Suite, an integrated suite of business applications developed specifically for IT, provides CIOs with the visibility and control required to manage the projects, vendors, people, budgets, and governance challenges of IT. In conjunction with the ITM Business Suite, the company also provides best practice expertise on IT business management.




Company Overview

ITM Software has a single goal and focus – support the success of CIOs. ITM Software provides software products and management expertise that helps CIOs establish themselves as business leaders and excel in the role of the General Manager of the IT function.

The company's unique combination of software products and management expertise enables CIOs to drive down IT costs, deliver more business value, and support the increasingly rapid pace of business demands.

ITM Software provides CIOs and IT leaders with software products and management expertise that advance the business management of Information Technology. The company has a single focus on serving the business management needs of IT organizations. Lead by ex-CIOs and IT leaders, ITM Software possesses a unique perspective on the management challenges facing today's CIOs. This experience base, combined with a world-class software development team, translates into products and best-practice expertise that bring a business-centric approach to managing IT.

The ITM Business Suite, an integrated suite of business applications developed specifically for IT, provides CIOs with the visibility and control required to manage the projects, vendors, people, budgets, and governance challenges of IT. In conjunction with the ITM Business Suite, the company also provides best practice expertise on IT business management.

ITM Software serves IT organizations within Fortune 2000 corporations, government agencies and universities. ITM Software is privately held and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

The ITM Software Story

During the Fall of 2002 the founders of ITM Software, all experience IT leaders, explored a question that had caused them ongoing frustration during their combined 20+ years managing the IT organization in various large successful enterprise companies. Although IT was undoubtedly mission critical to the enterprise, why was it such a challenge for the CIO to successfully build an organization that was truly valued by the business leaders within the corporation? It struck them that IT management challenges were related to running a massively complex business – a business that was comprised of hundreds of employees, close to a thousand vendors, and a large budget.

As it turns out, IT is primarily managed using a collection of complex spreadsheets and in-house developed tools. This "management environment" results in islands of information throughout the IT organization that literally take months to manually compile every time a critical business decision needs to be made. Ironically, while IT has spent years deploying integrated enterprise business application suites for every other function in the enterprise (ERP, CRM, SFA, etc.), they are still using rudimentary management tools. This is what ultimately caused the founders of ITM Software to consider the potential of bringing the promise of enterprise business applications to the IT organization.

This is the premise of ITM Software-that IT is as complex a business as any other within the enterprise and demands the same class of integrated business management applications as do its peer functions. Today, ITM Software is a privately held enterprise software company with a single focus-the success of the CIO and the IT organization. Our integrated suite of business applications and domain expertise in IT business management combine to allow us to uniquely address the challenges faced by today's CIOs-better managing costs, adding more business value, and establishing more strategic partnerships throughout the enterprise.

ITM Software serves IT organizations within Fortune 2000 corporations, government agencies and universities. ITM Software is privately held and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Voltaire - The Grid Backbone

www.voltaire.com Voltaire develops and markets industry-leading interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing. Voltaire began with the mission to provide the high performance computing (HPC) and enterprise markets with extraordinary standards-based interconnect technology for clustering and I/O. Today, as compute clusters evolve into grid computing architectures, our solutions have reached a level of maturity and advanced functionality to make high performance grid computing a reality.

Grid computing unites pools of servers, storage systems and networks into one large system that better addresses compute jobs by sharing the workload across many low cost machines. It can be part of an on demand or virtualization architecture in the next generation data center. The value that a grid computing system brings to an organization is increased utilization of computing resources, lower computing costs and the added assurance of a modular, scalable solution based on industry standard components.

Voltaire’s interconnect solutions are the enabling networking technology for clusters and grids and interoperate with all of the necessary elements to make high performance grid computing possible. Based on InfiniBand infrastructure, Voltaire’s solutions enable high performance applications to run on industry standard servers and storage – the essence of grids.

Voltaire offers a complete family of interconnect solutions including InfiniBand switches, adapters, InfiniBand-to-IP routers, InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel routers and software. For HPC customers, Voltaire has the largest capacity switching solutions and most robust and scalable software to enable clusters and grids of the highest size. For enterprise grid computing and database clustering, Voltaire offers the most comprehensive interconnect solutions that easily integrate with leading database and storage applications. Unlike Ethernet or proprietary networking technologies, Voltaire’s interconnect solutions offer unbeatable price performance, proven scalability and high performance connectivity to storage.

Univa - Supported Globus Grid

www.univa.com Univa is transforming enterprise IT by harnessing the power of Globus open source software to deliver enterprise-class products, technical support, and professional services to corporations and government.

Grid challenge, Univa solution

Grid technology, such as Globus software, increases a company's flexibility and speed by optimizing the use of existing IT resources. This is why the market for Grid technology is expanding quickly around the globe—it's estimated to reach at least $5 billion in 2008.

The problem is that open source Globus software is still largely unpackaged and unsupported for enterprise use. That's where Univa comes in.

Founded in early 2004 by Globus pioneers Steve Tuecke, Dr. Ian Foster, and Dr. Carl Kesselman, Univa bases its solutions on Globus software. Our products, solutions, and services focus on providing commercially supported, open source middleware that can be used by our partners and enterprise customers in conjunction with a broad set of branded products and technologies.

Paremus - Redefining enterprise grid

www.paremus.com Paremus, an acknowledged innovator of next generation distributed software systems, focuses exclusively on agile, self-healing, self-managing and dynamically scalable grid computing platforms, for enabling next generation service oriented, on demand, virtualized business applications.

Our flagship product, the Infiniflow enterprise service fabric, realizes Paremus' vision for delivering enterprise grid technology by leveraging complex adaptive system design principles to achieve true autonomic behavior

Paremus was founded in 2001 by Dr. Richard Nicholson and Richard Barclay with funding from a group of private investors with a successful track-record in building IT companies. As senior IT architects from the investment banking industry, the company founders recognized that emerging technology trends would fundamentally change the way that large enterprise IT systems could be deployed, managed and maintained.

Enigmatec - IT Management for next generation data centers

www.enigmatec.com Enigmatec Corporation is a provider of strategic management software optimized for the next generation of modular data center.

The huge trend towards the Modular Data Centre and the Enterprise Grid (virtualization, on demand) driven by the adoption of Intel blade servers and Linux, has resulted in infrastructures becoming more complex and in both business and IT complexity mean more risk. In addition, IT departments are increasingly being targeted with aligning IT with business objectives and increasing operational efficiency. Becoming more adaptive to the ever changing IT landscape means having a manageable, scalable and flexible architecture.

Based on research pioneered at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, Enigmatec has developed software for the next generation of data centres. Our Execution Management System (EMS) is the only product that allows users to codify and automate their operational procedures in a flexible and scalable way while aligning business objectives (such as Service Level Agreements), with policy-management. EMS provides the tools to integrate technical performance measures with business performance information to effectively:

* Ensure Quality of Service for SLA's
* Reduce Business Downtime Prevention
* Better Utilize Resources
* Reduce Operational Risk

With Enigmatec's automated policy-based execution management system (EMS) acting as the control plane between the business objectives that drive an Enterprise and the IT resources required to execute these, businesses can lower operating cost and reduce business downtime with solutions for scale-out scale-back, orchestrated disaster recovery and business continuity.

Avarsys - Enterprise Grid Computing Architecture

www.avarsys.com According to an independent survey of America’s fastest growing companies, 47% of their CEOs believe their most critical success factor is having flexible strategies to respond to accelerating business changes. They see change being driven by the increasingly dynamic global economy, regulatory requirements and high levels of innovation that typically refers to technology.

AvarSYS agrees with 47% of the CEOs surveyed and adopted a definite aim to be a leader in providing economic business integration solutions that are flexible, unstoppable and adaptive to accelerating business changes just-in-time.

AvarSYS is a solution provider specializing in developing, integrating and deploying service-oriented architectures with underlining grid and on demand virtualized computing infrastructure and application technologies for public and private market sectors worldwide.

AvarSYS carefully chooses stable global partners that share its vision and commitment to proven technologies and services needed for its solutions. One key partner and strategic influencer is the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) who is a vendor-neutral, global consortium focused on grid technologies that are used in our infrastructure solutions.

AvarSYS Solution Focuses are:

* Full Enterprise Grid Computing and Service-Oriented Reference Architectures
* Platform Migrations & Consolidations
* BI and Operational Grid Applications
* Resource and Administration Management Tools
* SOA and Grid Component Provisioning
* Professional Services

Optena - Do IT Smart (Grid spaces)

www.optena.com GridSpaces is a next generation Grid computing platform that empowers commercial organizations to effectively manage and affordably leverage the power of Grids. GridSpaces brings the power of real-time analysis and decision making to any organization - significantly reducing the cycle time of information intensive business processes.

Optena helped Oracle reduce their testing cycles by 80% and significantly reduce capital and operational costs, increase the developer productivity and product quality.

Optena GridSpaces harnesses the power of Grid computing within a dynamic, highly automated management environment. GridSpaces enables the centralized command and control of distributed Grid resources, eliminating the tedious and repetitious management tasks associated with first generation Grid platforms. Powered by a Dynamic Sense and Respond Architecture, GridSpaces can also automatically and continuously align the computing Grid’s resources to optimize computational business applications – with no manual tuning or administration.

www.gridalliance.org

www.gridalliance.org The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) consortium develops enterprise grid solutions and accelerates the deployment of grid computing, virtualization and on demand architectures in enterprises. The Alliance addresses obstacles that organizations face in using enterprise grids through open, interoperable solutions and best practices. By focusing exclusively on the needs of enterprise users, the EGA is enabling businesses to realize the many benefits of grid computing such as faster response to changing business needs, better utilization and service level performance and lower IT operating costs.

Qlusters - Keeps your data center up and running

www.qlusters.com Qlusters provides an open source systems management platform to automate enterprise data centers.

Qlusters significantly reduces annual management costs for complex enterprise data centers, increases server utilization, and minimizes downtime of IT infrastructure and business applications. Qlusters Resource Manager is a proven, open source systems management that integrates with existing components in enterprise data centers to create scalable, highly available and customizable infrastructures. Used as part of an on demand, IT automation or virtual data center strategy.

Challenges:

Today’s data centers face many of the following challenges:

* Growing number of servers, measured in hundreds, if not thousands
* Quality of service, especially availability, difficult to ensure compared to legacy systems
* Inconsistent policies applied to IT assets and operations
* Workload fluctuations and unpredictable demand spikes
* Inflexible infrastructure with applications tied to individual servers

Qlusters has introduced a next generation, open source systems management platform, Qlusters Resource Manager, built specifically to address these challenges

Benefits realized by Qlusters Resource Manager:

Qlusters Resource Manager delivers value to data centers by:

* Reducing cost of management: allows system administrators to effectively manage hundreds of servers versus a few dozen systems
* Minimizing downtime of infrastructure and applications: handles application failures smoothly and automatically, without manual intervention
* Increased server utilization: reduces data centers needs to over-provision server resources to applications, now data centers can deploy servers when needed

Qlusters Resource Manager allows data centers to operate more servers without adding staff, and eliminates much of the fire fighting faced by administrators today. Enterprises save money and IT staffs dedicate more attention to value-add projects.

Built on Open Source:
The foundation of Qlusters Resource Manager is the open source project openQRM. This allows Qlusters to offer customers who desire customized implementations an alternative to closed source software and professional services, that is access to source code.
Qlusters’ approach differs from closed vendors whose business practices lock customers into proprietary products, and expensive, time-consuming deployments. Data centers can stop paying the “proprietary tax” of closed source system management solutions by implementing Qlusters Resource Manager.

Download openQRM and see for yourself: www.openQRM.org

Qlusters Resource Manager capabilities:

Qlusters Resource Manager provides value through the following features:

Automating IT and business policies: implements application-specific policies automatically to ensure IT service level objectives.

Dynamic provisioning: deploys applications to customers in minutes, not hours, allowing data centers to respond to fluctuations in demand. Resources provisioned as needed according to policy, so companies avoid the cost of over-provisioning and the pain of under-provisioning.

Centralized image management: provides a single view of all systems, providing improved management and audit of IT assets. Administrators can apply updates and patches, or roll-back, in minutes, across hundreds of systems.

Hardware and Application High Availability: simplified availability options allows for IT departments to provide superior availability objectives to more applications at a lower cost.

Systinet - a Mercury Division - SOA and Web Services Lifecycle and Governance

www.systinet.com Systinet provides the foundation for SOA governance and lifecycle management, making IT simpler, faster and standards-based.

With its suite of award-winning and proven products, Systinet enables organizations to rapidly leverage and reuse their existing applications and data assets, provide interoperability among heterogeneous systems, and better align business processes with IT. Systinet's products enable, publish, discover and manage SOA business services, and make it easy to build secure and reliable Web services with Java and C++ applications.

Systinet products are based on industry standards such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. A pioneer in SOA technology, Systinet led the development of important standards at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), OASIS and elsewhere, while remaining consistently first-to-market with advanced and innovative products based on these standards.

More than 150 Global 2000 companies rely on Systinet technology, including Amazon.com, The Hartford, Interwoven, JPMorgan, Motorola, Defense Information Systems Agency, and Société Générale. Founded in 2000, Systinet is a privately held company with headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts, and offices in Paris, Amsterdam and Prague.

Webify Solutions - Enabling the on demand enterprise

www.webifysolutions.com Webify Solutions is a leading provider of vertically based, service-oriented business software. The Webify SOBA Fabric and SOBA Suite of products enable companies to improve business agility, streamline operations, and implement new business models by both enhancing core IT systems and flexibly leveraging external business service providers.

Virtualized, on demand services will transform the enterprise software market. Over the past decade, Webify's management team has successfully capitalized on emerging Internet and enterprise software technologies.

Webify SOBA Fabric is an integrated environment for policy driven sourcing, assembly, delivery and governance of business services and service oriented business applications (SOBA). It enables policy and context driven assembly, provisioning, personalization, and delivery of business services, events, and processes. Webify SOBA Fabric addresses and simplifies business, technology, security, governance, and interoperability issues raised by loosely coupled processes and services in a SOA.
Webify SOBA Fabric is platform neutral. It is sold in two versions: Webify SOBA Fabric for Healthcare and Webify SOBA Fabric for Insurance. Webify SOBA Fabric is optimized to IBM WebSphere business integration middleware and is certified as "IBM On Demand Optimized".

Webify Healthcare SOBA Suites is a family of pre-built SOA assets that automate complex business processes around care management, high-deductible healthcare spending accounts, and payer-provider collaboration. These SOBAs serve as business accelerators and plug into the complementary Webify SOBA Fabric for Healthcare for enhanced business agility, secure semantic interoperability, and improved SOA governance.

Webify Insurance SOBA Suites is a family of pre-built SOA assets that allow insurers to innovate and transform core business processes such as claims, policy and new business to drive sales, simplify distribution and improve customer service. These SOBAs serve as business accelerators and plug into the complementary Webify SOBA Fabric for Insurance for enhanced business agility, secure semantic interoperability, and improved SOA governance.

Application Architecture Evolution

Webify competes in an emerging and rapidly growing market for service oriented business applications (SOBA). Built on open Web services standards and industry semantics, these applications help companies dramatically cut costs, increase revenues, and improve competitive agility by combining existing, heterogeneous systems and outsourced service providers into cross-functional, multi-company business processes.

Businesses spent nearly $18 billion in 2002 on enterprise applications, according to Gartner Research. Of that total, less than 5% was spent on service oriented business applications. Gartner predicts that within several years, SOA based applications will become the dominant mode for deployment of new application solutions for Fortune 2000 companies.

Since its inception, Webify has launched successful SOBAs for industry leaders in Healthcare and Insurance markets. Privately held Webify Solutions is based in Austin, TX and branch offices in London, UK and Mumbai, India.

Platform - Enterprise Grid Software Solutions

www.platform.com Platform Computing is the industry leader in enterprise grid and utility computing software solutions. The solution of choice for over 80 per cent of the Fortune 2000, Platform delivers enterprise grid solutions to enable organizations to optimize IT resources and align with business objectives in real time.

Our 1700 + customers such as AMD, JPMorgan Chase, Peugeot, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and GE trust us to increase the value of their IT investment with adaptive policy driven grid and on demand solutions to improve service levels, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

Platform software solutions are implemented to grid-enable applications and consolidate IT resources across a shared, virtualized infrastructure. To fully optimize your IT resources, Platform products enable your applications to dynamically and intelligently share resources through self-management, guaranteed service, resource provisioning and workload management across a grid.

Our comprehensive program management and training processes help you consistently manage grid initiatives, deploy Platform grid software across your organization over time, and share knowledge and skills throughout your organization.

Core to Platform products is Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO), the first and only grid platform that will deliver the power of virtualization, automation and the sharing of all IT resources to every application type. Platform EGO provides a flexible and modular way to orchestrate all enterprise application types into a single, cohesive, efficient system. By de-coupling resource management from workload management, Platform EGO can effectively allocate, prioritize and manage the supply of resources with business policies across the enterprise. This functionality provides organizations the ability to scale up and scale out, while improving application performance, resource utilization and achieving better SLA management overall. Platform EGO leverages 13 years of grid leadership into the enterprise comprised of hundreds to tens of thousands of CPU's.