By tapping into the power of Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com, CDO2 has been able to reduce time to market of its pricing and risk technology products and services. This is a prime example of a company in the financial services industry that is benefiting from a public compute utility without the need to make large capital investments in IT infrastructure; Sun Grid has made compute power an operational expense as oppose to a capital expense. A change that I am sure would be welcomed by many CFO's tired of carrying the high capital cost of IT on their books. The Sun Grid model allows customers to access an enourmous compute power over the network as needed, and we only charge them for what they use, no reservation required, and no long-term contracts required. Compare that to the traditional hosting model that requires customers to make long-term commitments, sets aside dedicated compute resources, and charges them a fixed price for these resources regardless of utilitzation and consumption. In a true compute utility model, utilitzation is the vendor's headache, not the customer's. The same goes for power, space, amortization, and maintenance. This is like taking a Taxi cab. You just pay the fare, and don't have to worry about oil change, tires, gas, and windshield wipers, or the driver's health care plan. No commitment. The Taxi just drops you off where you want to go.

In the case of CDO2, they have been able to shorten time to market significantly, reducing computation time from hours to minutes. In addition, they are able to service more customers than before. By using Sun Grid instead of in-house grids or network of desktop computers for their compute-intensive applications, they estimate that their addressable target market has grown tenfold! Sun Grid has enabled this particular customer to grow its business and develop a highly scalable business model without the constraints of IT investments. Talk about benefits.

What about security? This is sensitive financial data, right? Sun Grid is designed from the ground up as a secure environment and offers multi-layered defenses around critical information assets. It also runs on Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System.

For those interested in learning more about the benefits CDO2 has realized by using Sun Grid, check out this summary.