Friday, March 10, 2006

It's the Infrastructure

Update 2006-03-14 11:31 Changed a nonsensical word.

I spend a lot of time explaining the value of what Digipede does to people: whether it's potential customers, potential investors, my mom, or people riding next to me on BART--it's something I like talking about, and it's something I believe very strongly in. Add that together with my love for mellifluous voice, and it's a recipe for me talking about Digipede a lot!

One thing that's come up frequently lately is the idea of grid infrastructure.

Before I go too deeply into that, let me explain something about our customers. I can divide our customers neatly into two camps: customers who bought the Digipede Network to accelerate/scale/distribute a particular application, and customers who are using the Digipede Network for a much broader suite of applications.

To the former group of customers, it's a tool. They had a particular need for a particular piece of software, and they found that the Digipede Network filled that need.

To the second group of customers, though, it's much more than just a tool. It's now part of their development and IT infrastructures. We have one customer who is running at least three different applications on their grid now, and they will undoubtedly do more: they are porting current applications that need increased speed or scalability, but they are also looking at developing new applications. Their developers don't just have a new tool they can use: they also have an infrastructure that allows them to do something they've never been able to do before.

Having a grid infrastructure in place means that developers can begin to take on assignments that seemed impossible before--analyzing more data, or deeper analysis of a particular trade. Having much, much more powerful software means that the users' lives change. Rather than analyze hundreds of trades, they can analyze thousands. Rather than run a trade run once a day (at night, when everyone has gone home), they can run it frequently throughout the day.

A good grid infrastructure does more than just speed up an application. It changes the way the developers work. It changes the way the users work.