"Nobody understands that time is money quite like the Financial Services industry, where complex decisions and risk evaluations need to be made at a fast pace to retain an advantage in an increasingly competitive industry," said Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing. "Symphony empowers our customers to make business decisions in real time, maximizing their available IT resources and fully leveraging the potential of the enterprise grid to improve the bottom line."

Over the last few years, leading investment banks adopting Platform Symphony have experienced the power of grid software to transform their businesses. By virtualizing heterogeneous hardware resources and running multiple applications in a shared environment, customers have successfully transitioned from costly SMP to enterprise grid. Breaking down application silos within an enterprise, Symphony gives organizations the ability to scale and adapt IT according to their business needs. This empowers enterprise IT to consolidate risks across multiple lines of businesses (LOBs), reduce the total cost of ownership and dynamically respond to growth opportunities.

"As grid clients require higher throughput computing, on-demand scalability, both upward and downward, is paramount," said David Gelardi, Vice President of IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Computing Centers. "IBM hosted Platform's Symphony 3 scalability testing on 1000 CPUs, giving them the ability to validate simulated tests in a real environment and demonstrating that large scale grid deployments are possible today."

Symphony was tested on Windows and Linux systems and was validated to support in excess of 20,000 CPUs. For a single parallel application scaling up to 1,000 CPUs, Symphony achieved a utilization rate of more than 97% and task latency of 2.4 milliseconds. Symphony demonstrated extremely high throughput with 2,000 concurrent clients running 100 grid-enabled applications. Symphony’s industry leading scalability and performance ensures that a customer’s IT environment will dynamically grow alongside their business.

With the new, open architecture of Symphony 3, businesses can run multiple applications while having the flexibility to upgrade one application without impacting others. Core to Symphony 3 is Platform EGO, the industry leading grid platform that delivers the power of virtualization, automation and sharing of all IT resources to any enterprise application. Grid technology has evolved with Symphony to provide the real benefits of having a common grid platform, supporting multiple applications on the same grid and managing them through a common web-based Platform Management Console.

"In the fast moving world of finance, our cross-asset trading and processing software needs to keep pace with a state of the art feature set, but also with the ever changing IT environment. This made it clear to us that integrating with Symphony would provide critical value to our customers by extending Calypso across a distributed, virtualized IT infrastructure," said Gerard Rafie, VP of Marketing, Calypso. "Working together, Calypso and Symphony are ready to scale with our clients needs."

To further eliminate the barriers to adopting grid, Symphony 3 introduces the Symphony Developer Edition free of charge to qualified developers. Symphony Developer Edition is the first and only solution tailored for developing and testing grid ready Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) applications. By making it easy to interface with Symphony APIs, application developers and LOBs have the flexibility to build and test applications independent of the underlying grid infrastructure, resulting in less time required to develop and deploy new applications. Reducing the time required to grid-enable applications results in accelerated performance of these applications leading to increased revenue generation.