Enterprise Utility Computing (EUC) successfully demonstrated using Platform VM Orchestrator™ (VMO) in the Enterprise Grid Solutions Showcase at LinuxWorld, Boston

Toronto, ON –Tuesday April 4th LinuxWorld, 2006 –Platform Computing® (www.platform.com), the global leader in grid computing, today announced the successful joint deployment of an Enterprise Utility Computing (EUC) solution that will be demonstrated in the Enterprise Grid Solutions Showcase at LinuxWorld in Boston, April 3-6, 2006. This demonstration allows customers to learn about the benefits of grid, virtualization and how grid-enabled enterprise applications provide the necessary foundation for robust and agile business services. Other participating partners include Intel, SAS and VMware. The demonstration also provides attendees with practical information and best practices supporting successful approaches for applying grid solutions within their own enterprise IT environments.

The Enterprise Utility Computing demonstration consists of a virtualized pool of IT resources that can be dynamically provisioned to ensure that they are easily and continually reallocated in real-time according to dynamic business needs. Further, the usage of resources can be tracked and billed down to the level of an individual user or group.

"Enterprise IT is facing tremendous pressure to increase utilization of infrastructure resources, as well as deliver predictable service levels for the growing number of applications and volumes of data that are needed to run and operate a business." said Robert Fogel, Worldwide Director of Grid Strategy & Business Development, Intel Corporation "This demonstration gives a first-hand opportunity to actually see how Enterprise Utility Computing is playing an important role in the enterprise."

The foundation of the EUC demonstration is Platform VM Orchestrator™ (VMO) built on Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator™ (EGO) technology to provision both virtual and physical compute resources on-demand to satisfy an organization's changing service level and IT policy requirements. SAS Grid-enabled applications, including SAS Grid Manager, SAS Business Intelligence Server and SAS Enterprise Miner, can be dynamically and transparently allocated more resources as business demands change. Further, accurate costing of services based on resource consumption for individual business units can be made so that the processing of daily transactions can be properly recorded.

"By partnering with Intel and SAS, the EUC deployment illustrates how businesses can meet variable demands across their entire enterprise, resulting in increased business value, agility and flexibility." Said Chris Purpura, VP, New Ventures & Strategic Alliances "Platform’s products solve the problem for serving multiple applications or user groups by delivering a virtualized pool of computing resources that orchestrates on-demand and policy based allocation of resources to applications."

About Platform EGO and Platform VMO

Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO) is the first and only grid platform that delivers the power of virtualization, automation and sharing of all IT resources to any enterprise application. Platform EGO allows enterprises to realize sustainable competitive advantage through the optimization of mission critical applications and processes that enables any applications, services and workloads to access shared hardware, data, and services through advanced policy-based resource allocation and execution. Platform EGO embraces an open, secure, standards-based infrastructure to leverage existing technology investments and easily integrate with a broad range of hardware and software.

Built on Platform EGO, Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) is an automated, policy driven environment manager for virtual infrastructures that offers dynamic balance and control of all resources in real time for optimal quality of service and simplified configuration and management. As the migration towards virtual computing accelerates, enterprises must increasingly take steps to improve virtual machine (VM) availability, increase automation and better manage disparate environments. Platform VMO provides auto-provisioning according to business policies for improved capacity utilization and reduced man-hours. It also offers heterogeneous support of multiple vendors’ VM containers, including VMware and Xen, to offer investment protection of current and future investments.

The Enterprise Utility Computing demonstration is being showcased in Boston at the first-ever LinuxWorld Enterprise Grid Solution Showcase in association with Grid standards organizations EGA and GGF in conjunction with Intel Corporation and other key industry leaders (Booth #824).

Platform Computing’s, Gary Tyreman, Director of Product Management, New Ventures Group (NVG) will also be presenting in the Enterprise Grid Solution Showcase - "Driving IT Virtualization using Enterprise Grid" on Wednesday April 5th, 2006 from 4.30pm-4.50pm.

Specifics on the Enterprise Utility Computing demonstrations are as follows: April 4th-6th, 2006 – 10.45am-11.05am; 11.45am-12.05am; 3.00pm-3.20pm; 4.00pm-4.30pm.

About Platform Computing

Platform Computing, the global leader in grid computing solutions, helps enterprises accelerate key business applications, reduce operational and capital costs, guarantee service levels and optimize their IT resources. Platform’s integrated desktop and enterprise grid software solutions are used by over 1,700 customers worldwide in the financial services, government, industrial manufacturing, electronics, life science and oil and gas industries to deliver higher quality products and services, improve business performance and maximize the return on IT investments. Founded in 1992, Platform has strategic relationships with Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, SAS and SGI, and the Industry’s broadest application integration support. More information about Platform can be found at www.platform.com.