British Telecom (BT) has selected United Devices' Grid technology to power its virtual services platform, a new managed Grid service offering. This network-centric application delivery model ensures mission-critical business functions via Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that govern how customers run applications in a reliable and predictable manner.
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.
Last year Johnson & Johnson united its grids in the US and Europe. Jeff Mathers, Director of Technology Office Strategy and Delivery at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, discusses the challenges.
When most big pharma companies were cautious about investing too much time and resources in the relatively unchartered waters of grid technology. Johnson & Johnson had already plunged headfirst into deploying grids in the US and Europe. By 2004, under the direction of Jeff Mathers, Director of Technology Office Strategy and Delivery at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, L.L.C., (J&JPRD), part of Johnson & Johnson, his team had activated the first clinical development system to run on the grid, allowing the company to quickly push several drugs through the FDA approval process and saving millions of dollars from the bottom line.
I t's no surprise that financial-services giant JPMorgan Chase is a pioneer in the quest for automated, virtualized New Data Center technologies. With assets of $1.2 trillion and operations in 50 countries, the company is engaged in multiple initiatives all working toward the common goals of maximizing IT resources, reducing costs and speeding performance. Examples include grid computing, policy-based management of virtualized resources and automated application mapping and change control. As these projects evolve, they will ideally converge and enable the New York-based financial-services giant to conquer tomorrow's IT challenges.
May 22, 2006 (Computerworld) Wachovia Corp. has freed some of its Java-based software from dedicated servers to let the transaction applications draw computing power from a pool of 10,000 processors spread across cities in the U.S. and U.K.
The financial services firm began the grid effort more than a year ago with the installation of FabricServer adaptive grid infrastructure software from New York-based grid technology vendor DataSynapse Inc.
The FabricServer software virtualizes transaction applications and enables them to scale across hardware resources as needed. DataSynapse announced the Wachovia implementation last week.
March 1, 2005 - Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. has been no stranger to technology outsourcing initiatives over the past three years. But the term "outsourcing" might be an inaccurate depiction of what the carrier's senior IT team regards to be its mandate. Instead, Fireman's Chief Technology Officer Diane Comer views these agreements as "strategic partnerships."
NDCHealth Corp. and Acxiom Corp. announced a long-term strategic initiative whereby Acxiom will transform and manage the technology infrastructure of NDCHealth's Information Management business unit. The collaborative project will create a proprietary data factory for NDCHealth utilizing Acxiom's automated Grid-enabled information management platform.
NDCHealth is a leading provider of health care technology and information solutions serving pharmacies, hospitals and health systems, health care professionals in medical practices, and more than 100 of the top pharmaceutical manufacturers. NDCHealth's Information Management unit collects data from retail pharmacies, health care institutions, and managed care entities in the United States, and tracks nearly 300,000 drug codes to monitor prescribing activity by over 1.6 million physicians and health care providers. The Information Management unit utilizes more than 85TB of unique data assets to offer informatics and decision support solutions enabling pharmaceutical manufacturers to evaluate market performance, more effectively develop and position product offerings, optimize marketing and sales strategies, and better understand the impact of drug therapies.
IBM has announced new Grid computing implementations with Japanese regional Higo Bank and Italy's UniCredit.
In Japan, Higo Bank has instituted an information Grid that provides data on demand from various loan systems at multiple platforms, providing real-time application integration, and speeding up the customer loan process from application to completion by 30%. The Grid solution was built on IBM eServer pSeries, TotalStorage (Enterprise Storage Server and Linear Tape Open Drives), DB2, and WebSphere Information Integrator.
With increased pressure on bottom lines and top lines pharma , companies must turn to IT for competitive edge. Grid computing will be the next big technology for R&D labs to reduce time to market, says Arun Gupta, Senior Director, Business Technology, Pfizer
BT is jumping wholeheartedly into the virtualisation pool, powered by grid computing (where computer resources are pooled and made available on-demand to a range of applications). Speaking at a UK grid computing seminar, BT Group's Innovations Delivery Manger, Frank Falcon highlighted the role of delivered services to the telco's long term future. Telco.
