The new year is a time for reflection, especially after the turbulent economic environment that marked 2009. In that spirit, HPCwire invited the HPC vendor community to post a new year’s message to our readers. Today we hear from Dr. Songnian Zhou, CEO, chairman and co-founder of Platform Computing.
In 2009 and in the face of many economic challenges, Platform Computing continued our 17-year track record of growth and profitability. We have taken advantage of this market downturn and strengthened our market leadership position for HPC management software. This year, many of the promises of cloud computing started to become realities, whether they were enhancements of existing HPC systems or pilots for new private cloud architectures. It was a year where virtualization, utility computing, and resource management for infrastructure sharing came together for many in our customer community.
Financial services, electronics, manufacturing, software development, government, education, and entertainment industries all demonstrated clear paths from HPC clusters and grids to cloud and, equally importantly, clear paths from virtualization to utility and commodity computing. Our customers are working to sort out their private cloud architectures, and Platform Computing is working hand in hand to ensure that we provide open, smart and solid cloud solutions. We are investing more than ever in the HPC market to enable this major architectural evolution.
SAS, CERN and Harvard Medical School are just a few of the customers that have been publicly recognized and awarded for their private cloud deployments this year. Many other examples exist and continue to emerge. We encourage folks to explore these on our website.
Going forward, we see two major trends in the HPC community: the adoption of private clouds and a more mainstream enterprise adoption of HPC clusters both within and beyond traditional HPC applications. Deeper HPC partnerships and new cloud management products were our focus in 2009 and remain our focus in 2010. Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster were newly launched products in 2009 that gained immediate traction with customers. New product bundles and offers with Dell, HP, IBM, Cray, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAS, ANSYS and Simulia came in response to increasing demands for performance, throughput, cost-reduction and ease of deployment of HPC and enterprise application clusters.
As we look forward to 2010, we expect the HPC market to resume its growth as more applications leverage the cost effectiveness of community-based and cloud computing. Platform Computing remains excited about and committed to the HPC market and will continue to deliver the most innovative HPC management software solutions.