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September 25, 2006
Talking Grid with IBM's Ken King
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Ken King is vice president of Grid computing with responsibility for worldwide business line management of IBM's Grid computing initiatives, including business and technical strategy. In this GRIDtoday Q&A, which originally ran as a part of GRIDwire**, King discuss IBM's Grid and Grow program, the buzz on SOA and virtualization, and where the ceiling is for the Open Grid Forum.
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GRIDtoday: First, how's the Grid computing business doing at IBM? Do you have any big news on the horizon?
KEN KING: We have been very pleased with our Grid business. Our Grid strategy has allowed us to work with customers to drive new levels of innovation, whether it be by solving problems they couldn't solve before, or allowing them to offer new services inconceivable before or transforming a business process or how something is accomplished within a given company. We are also pleased with how Grid is driving new enhancements to our solutions and middleware portfolio. In terms of big news on the horizon, we continue to enhance our Grid middleware portfolio. Our announcement this week with the Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker is one such example.
We also are seeing a lot of interest in solving the information challenge, and we have worked with clients to implement information grids either to deliver information faster to remove computation bottlenecks or to create a federated view of data to improve collaboration or to gain new levels of business insight from a unified view of the data. SOA continues to be a key focus for us as well, with Grid being a key means of building a dynamic infrastructure that supports a service-oriented architecture and with how you match resources-either execution engines or information, to services and dynamic applications. And last is our big focus on expanding the ecosystem with our partner programs which will continue to help expand the adoption of Grid with all sizes and types of customers.
Gt: Can you speak a little about IBM's line Grid solutions/programs, specifically Grid and Grow?
KING: We are expanding our offerings, solutions and programs as we see opportunity in the market place. We started in conventional grid use -- high-performance computing, research, academia and philanthropy -- and we have led the way in helping customers of all types and sizes, across all industries, leverage Grid for business value. In order to help create an "on ramp" for Grid, we announced Grid and Grow in May of 2005. Since then, we have expanded the program extensively. We have modified the offering to include the SMB market, where Grid opportunities are only really starting to emerge and we are taking the basic offering and modifying the bundles and service offerings to make very specific Grid solutions to solve specific industry pain points, as we did with the Grid and Grow for Actuarial Analysis announcement we made this summer.
In the meantime, we are putting great focus on the "Grow" part of Grid and Grow. We are finding, in the spirit of the program, that once clients incorporate Grid technology, they want to expand either addressing the need for additional application areas, larger grids, or looking at the benefits that can be gained from data grids. We have over 80 different Grid ISVs that provide specific software and middleware for us to offer to our clients for them to leverage and extend their Grid installations.
Further, we aren't focused solely on Grid and Grow bundles. We continue to work with enterprise and mid-market clients for customized Grid solutions as well as our integrated solutions such as our Grid Medical Archive Solution, Optimized Analytic Infrastructure for Financial Sector and IT Resource optimization for Engineering. We are also very proud of our work with the World Community Grid and other research and educational based grids like our work with SURAgrid, LA Grid and "Big Red" at Indiana University, all of which we have announced in the last year.
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