Platform Computing, the global leader in grid and cloud solutions for the financial services industry, continues to see strong revenue growth in its FS business as organisations move aggressively to reduce costs through the adoption of grid and cloud technology. In the depths of a global financial crisis, Platform continues to bring on new customers through competitive wins in key global geographies, including Germany’s second largest bank, as FS institutions prefer to stake their future in proven market leaders that offer less risk. Accordingly, Platform is investing heavily in its FS business unit including advancing its existing products, hiring new staff and accelerating the development of its new cloud solution, which addresses the needs of financial services to consolidate data centers.

Platform Computing has just released the next version of its flagship financial services product Platform Symphony 4.1. Symphony has emerged as the market leading software to support the demanding requirements of key banking processes such as intraday risk calculations, pre-trade pricing and end-of-day value at risk calculations. It also implements a utility service model that provides a powerful sharing capability that financial services organisations are leveraging to achieve higher resource utilisation. This helps reduce costs and data center energy usage while ensuring business service levels are met. At a time when IT budgets are shrinking and the need for risk management remains high, Platform’s solutions are playing a crucial role in helping financial services organizations reduce the total cost of ownership of these vital systems.

“The uncertainty that is still unfolding is driving enterprises to do more with existing infrastructure, especially since IT budgets look set to decrease by as much as 20% in the year ahead,” said William Fellows, Principal Analyst, The 451 Group. “As IT is charged to increase ROI and make better use of existing resources, the uptake of grid technologies in the financial services sector is expected to increase dramatically in coming months.”

Platform has also been investing in people, augmenting its FS team with more industry expertise. Most notably, Platform has appointed David Warm as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the FS business unit to help set strategy and to work closely with Platform’s key customers as the company defines its next generation offering around cloud computing. Mr. Warm, who well understands the needs of large banks, has over 20 years experience in FS with the major investment banks – JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Most recently at Merrill Lynch, he was responsible for infrastructure architecture solutions design and service delivery.

“Having over twenty years of industry experience addressing these same technology challenges from within investment banks brings tremendous advantages to my new role,” said David Warm, CTO, Financial Services, Platform Computing. “Working with Platform puts me in a strong position to contribute to innovative solutions that I know the industry is looking for. Leading edge firms see the value grid computing provides and are moving towards leveraging this same type of utility computing model for non-traditional grid workloads through adoption of internal clouds. Platform is working hand-in-hand with these firms to help them make this transition.”