Finance Spotlight: Grid, Utility and On-Demand Computing

Services
Amazon EC2
Sun Grid

Hardware
Dell
EMC
HP
IBM
Intel
Sun

Software
DataSynapse
Digipede
EMC
IBM
Microsoft
Oracle
Platform Comp
Sun

BEA Systems Lets Oracle Offer Expire

BEA Systems has defended itself for letting the Oracle  offer to purchase BEA expire. The BEA board explained its decision to rejects the $17 per share offer in a letter to Carl Icahn, BEA's largest stockholder who advocates the sale. Icahn says he owns 58 million shares of BEA stock. The BEA board wants a buyout price of $21 per share or $8.2 billion, which is 22% more more than the $6.7 billion Oracle offer. BEA faces the prospect of de-listing by NASDAQ for failure to file delinquent financial reports. BEA would be the 39th acquisition by Oracle since it bid for PeopleSoft in 2003.

Google, IBM Partner on Internet-Scale Computing

IBM and Google announced an initiative to boost knowledge of large-scale distributed computing among the academic community. The projects uses a cluster of several hundred computers, including Google server and IBM BladeServer. The grid is expected to grow to more than 1,600 processors.

Univa and Sun Announce Agreement To Offer Sun Grid Engine to Open Source Cluster Users

Univa Corporation, a provider of open source software and services for cluster and grid solutions, announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems. The agreement provides for integrating the Sun Grid Engine into the Univa Globus Cluster Edition software. Univa will also become a member of the Sun Partner Advantage Program and the agreement calls for co-marketing activities. Under the agreement, Univa users will have access to Sun high performance computing (HPC) products and services, including HPC Cluster Tools.