Powers Unfiltered

Marc at Magmasystems relates his findings from a recent trip to London, where he says:

Got together with some ex-colleagues, who were marvelling at the Lodnon consulting market.
The hot areas are Grid Computing, with the prevelant stack being DataSynapse and Tangasol. Also demand is picking up for WPF, with Morgan Stanley leading the way. The daily rates for qualified individuals are about 1000 pounds per day, which at the current exchange rates, is about $2000.

And

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft’s Compute Cluster Server and Digipede can make any inroads intot his market. There seems to be a very strong bias against using .NET for a grid infrastructure, something which I hope to see turned around in 2007.

It will be interesting to see, indeed.

The “strong bias” Marc reports is real — in some places.  But the financial services market is large, and surprisingly diverse.  Most of the bias we encounter seems to melt away when customers experience real benefits. 

.NET penetration is large and growing in financial services companies, and .NET workloads are (quite) difficult to adapt to a grid based primarily on Linux and Java.  We don’t have to win the hearts and minds of every Linux-centric grid user to make a big impact in this market. 

In our experience, the bias Marc describes is strongest in IT, which has been taught for years that grid computing means Linux and UNIX almost by definition.  But the developer community is different, and often more in touch with the scalability requirements of specific applications.  These are the hearts and minds Digipede and Microsoft are winning — because adapting applications to the grid needs to be easier, and that’s our strength.  Developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop their applications (.NET, COM, or anything else) find the Digipede Framework SDK provides the most natural approach available for adapting their applications to a grid.

And it’s free, as part of the Digipede Network Developer Edition.  Check it out, .NET developers — it might just be your ticket to 1000 pounds a day!   Here you go. 

Digipede and Microsoft are also working together to win over the IT guys.  With the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE), Microsoft has made the deployment and administration of many servers as easy as one (and dropped the price for compute-grid deployments by about 80% too — you need to check this out).   There is no question that for grid computing deployments in financial services, CCE represents the most cost-effective way to add computing power to a Digipede-based grid.

So – the change Marc is hoping for in 2007 is exactly what we’re working to make happen!