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IBM is expanding its grid- computing offerings to the financial services industry via partnerships with SAS Institute Inc. and DataSynapse Inc.
IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., is incorporating SAS business intelligence software into its IBM Grid Offering for Analytics Acceleration, which gives banks greater customer insight, officials said. Using the SAS software in a grid environment cuts the time needed to produce statistical models and analysis of banks customer bases, they said.
SAS, of Cary, N.C., was able to plug its software into the IBM grid-computing environment without customization, proving that such applications can be easily optimized for grids.
Meanwhile, IBM is partnering with DataSynapse, of New York, to enable financial services customers to manage risks, particularly as they pertain to such regulatory mandates as the Patriot Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Customers can use IBM Grid Offering for Risk Management and Compliance, which joins DataSynapse technology with IBMs grid products, to run applications for such jobs as monitoring credit limits.
Hewitt Associates LLC, an outsourcing and human resources consulting company in Lincolnshire, Ill., is building a grid using IBM BladeCenter blade servers and DataSynapses GridServer. “We have a mainframe application, and one component of the mainframe application was that it is extremely processor-intense,” said Dan Kaberon, director of computer resource management at Hewitt. “Its a very expensive piece to run … and very difficult to predict the workload. It wasnt economically very easy.” Using the grid, Hewitt reduced transactions costs by almost 90 percent without rewriting applications, said IBM.