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NEW YORK -- Wall Street IT Conference -- Platform Computing Inc. debuted the beta version of a new Enterprise Grid solution that will dramatically change how commercial institutions leverage enterprise IT assets to gain competitive advantage. With Platform Symphony(TM), financial institutions can process compute and time-sensitive applications, such as trading, pricing, risk analysis, profit and loss (P&L) reporting and trade settlement, in real time, faster and more accurately than ever before, across an Enterprise Grid computing infrastructure. Platform Symphony has been adopted by a major investment bank as the cornerstone of its globally distributed technology infrastructure, and is being evaluated by a number of other financial services institutions. Platform Symphony uses an open, service-oriented architecture that enables financial institutions to integrate all distributed IT assets to create a single, virtual environment, or a 'service layer' across the Enterprise Grid. Through this service layer, financial services institutions can transparently share applications across the enterprise, creating a dramatic shift where a traditional 'siloed' compute environment is transformed to a shared, service-oriented model. By connecting applications across integrated assets such as credit, interest rates, equities, foreign exchange and others, financial services institutions can leverage resources and information to develop customized services to better meet their clients' changing needs. "With increasing business and market pressures, financial services institutions are looking to Grids as a way to streamline analytical computing processes and to share and leverage globally dispersed assets to sharpen their competitive advantage," said Robert Batchelder, Research Director at Gartner. "As global enterprises, it is essential that they create Grid fabrics that weave together their entire analytical computing infrastructure, from internationally dispersed clusters to individual desktop machines." With its unique workload orchestration and service provisioning capabilities, Platform Symphony drives significant cost savings and productivity improvements by dynamically allocating and controlling the distribution of work, data and capacity across distributed, heterogeneous resources. Through integration with in-house distributed computing infrastructures using DCOM, CORBA, messaging, MPI, web services, .Net and J2EE, Platform Symphony transforms existing financial services technology environments into reliable, resilient, scalable and high-performance computing infrastructures. "Platform Symphony is built on a foundation of 10 years of proven expertise in workload and resource management in heterogeneous enterprise environments," said Michael Sharma, vice president, financial services, Platform. "By creating virtual pools of IT assets with Platform Symphony, financial institutions no longer need to sacrifice speed or accuracy -- they can get performance, cost and scale in one, integrated Enterprise Grid solution, without being constrained by their hardware. If a trader can reduce his risk analysis from one hour to two minutes, this has a significant impact on his revenue stream. Why put money on the sidelines when it can be invested?" In the competitive financial services industry, where time and accuracy often determine the difference between profit and loss, technology is often the gating factor. Financial services institutions are facing increased business, market, regulatory and operational challenges, such as increasing trade volumes, globalization, consolidation, straight through processing (STP), Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) T+1 regulations, intra-day reports and real-time analysis. To tackle these challenges, IT departments in investment banks must reduce time to results, provide high quality services, and shorten business cycles, all while reducing the need for additional IT expenditures. Over the next six to 18 months, Web services are expected to emerge as a key technology for building distributed financial applications. Because Web services applications require extensive computing resources, distributed and Grid computing tools like Platform Symphony will emerge as key enablers of Web services, allowing application developers to focus more on development instead of IT infrastructure concerns. Platform's Financial Services Group provides distributed computing solutions to the financial services market. Platform's customers, such as Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Mackenzie Financial Corp., Royal Bank Capital Markets, TD Canada Trust, and Fidelity Investments, have dramatically improved the efficiency and reliability of their IT infrastructures and the critical financial services applications they support, including front-, middle-, and back-office applications.