OIL & GAS

AUSTIN, Texas--United Devices, the market leader in secure grid solutions, today announced the company has signed a master relationship agreement with IBM. As part of this agreement, the companies will pursue joint marketing activities and sales to customers in life sciences, oil and gas, government, industrial engineering, financial services and several other important markets. IBM and United Devices will collaborate to bring the benefits of grid computing to both large enterprise and mid-market customers in targeted industries. Together, both companies have deployed hardware and software solutions at organizations such as Sanofi-Synthelabo, NTT Data and the University of Purdue. United Devices offers IBM's DB2 database software as a standard bundled offering with the Grid MP(tm) Enterprise platform. In addition, United Devices plans to introduce a version of its software intended to run on IBM eServer pSeries computers by the end of the year. The companies offer turnkey IBM grid solutions including eServer xSeries servers and Linux products. "At Purdue, DB2 serves a wide variety of purposes," said David Moffett, vice president of research computing services at Purdue University. "It is the underlying Linux database for our 2000+ host United Devices Grid/UD deployment. This diversity of platforms with a common set of administration tools reduces our training needs while providing a very capable database." "This partnership follows a natural evolution in our relationship to take enterprise grid adoption to the next level," said United Devices' CEO, Ed Hubbard. "We started using IBM servers and DB2 to run our global research at Grid.org and followed that up with a large number of enterprise deployments. Now, we have further solidified our relationship into a formal business partnership to address the needs of our enterprise grid customers." The United Devices' Grid MP Platform is proven to be scaleable, manageable and secure on the largest general-purpose public grid in the world at Grid.org and has been optimized for deployment in corporate enterprises as well as hosted, pay-per-use services. Companies using commercial or proprietary applications can now achieve dramatic increases in speed and scope -- drastically improving ROI and time to market.