Platform Computing Announces Infrastructure Sharing Services

The folks at Platform Computing are at it again.  This time, they've announced a product to support cloud computing in the form of infrastructure as a service (IaaS). They're calling it Platform Infrastructure Sharing Service (ISF).

As often is the case with a new product from a long established player, the technology appears to offer a great deal of capability, but that really isn't the issue when it comes to Platform Computing. The real issue for Platform is making decision makers aware of who it is and what it can do to help and then leading those who have become aware of Platform and its products to become interested enough to seek more information, come to desire the product because it can solve problems they're facing and, finally, take action to acquire the product. Awareness beyond its circle of friends has not been one of Platform's strongest areas in the past.

What Platform has to say about ISF

Platform’s 16 years as a proven leader in grid computing provides a natural evolution for the company to move into cloud infrastructure services. The Platform Infrastructure Sharing Facility (ISF) is a technology-agnostic, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing management platform that enables companies to use their existing resources to build and deploy enterprise clouds while tightly integrating with virtualization and data center automation solutions.

A bit on the market positioning and why Platform believes enterprise clouds are the answer to the cloud conundrum for most organizations:

Increasingly, business managers need to respond to the expectations that Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com are establishing within enterprises, forcing them to increase utilization of existing IT assets and look to pay-per-use models to control their IT budgets. Based on this demand, enterprise software vendors are responding with unique cloud-based solutions that mature the cloud computing paradigm and marketplace.  Given this demand to provide cloud-like services within enterprises, IT managers struggle to provide adequate resource sharing in an efficient manner.  Platform ISF addresses these by automating the delivery of self-service compute resources to developers, providing them with application environments in minutes from a shared pool of available resources. It is the only vendor-agnostic solution that gives business managers complete on-demand control over how to share and distribute resources among their applications.

Snapshot Analysis

Platform has long been a player in high performance computing, grid computing, management of physical and virtual resources and automation of those resources. It makes perfect sense that the company would take that expertise and technology and apply it to the rapidly emerging cloud computing marketplace.

If we consider critical requirements in the emerging cloud market place; cloud management, automation, security and storage; Platform has strengths and partnerships allowing the company to address many of the key needs.

Platform has long faced an issue, that is, outside of a circle of friends, the name Platform Computing is not really known. It may be because the company thought that its strengths in the areas of high performance and grid computing would immediately translate to success in other areas needing that type of "extreme processing." So, the company would enter a new market without learning the language used in that market.

Even though Platform had a very powerful solution, decision makers in that new market wouldn't always recognize Platform's strengths because unfamiliar catch phrases and jargon would be utilized to present Platform's offerings. This left the impression that Platform really didn't understand the needs of that market.  This, of course, wasn't really true. Failing to use the common language of a new market, however, is often a deal buster. The impression that is left is that the company is out of step with the issues and requirements of that new market.

Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice

Platform, the markets for managed services, hosting, application services, platform services and infrastructure services has existed for quite some time. There are already established players. A common language has emerged in these markets. If you make the effort to "fit in," you can be heard, your products considered and, where they're the best fit, selected by customers.

If you speak in the words of high performance computing, grid computing or automated engineering and design processing, you're not likely to be heard.