—Egenera BladeFrame's Unique Virtualization Capabilities Create Market Differentiation, Customer Value for Albridge—
Marlboro, Mass.—December 14, 2005—Egenera Inc., a global leader in utility computing, today announced that Albridge Solutions, a leading provider of enterprise data management (EDM) and portfolio-accounting and performance-reporting solutions, has selected the Egenera® BladeFrame® system for datacenter virtualization over offerings from three of the world's largest server vendors. Specifically, the Egenera BladeFrame offered advantages in availability, manageability, time to market and total cost of ownership.
"Albridge evaluated many configurations as part of a project to improve throughput, response time, scalability, reliability and recovery and determined that the Egenera BladeFrame system was the best solution," said Albridge President and CEO Greg Pacholski. "The Egenera BladeFrame's unique virtualized architecture will allow Albridge to continue increasing the levels of service and reliability we offer clients."
"Albridge has built a thriving, highly differentiated business by leveraging technology to create competitive advantage," noted Bob Dutkowsky, chairman, president and CEO at Egenera. "By using the Egenera BladeFrame to share computing resources across both clients and applications, Albridge is once again pushing the technology envelope and taking a leadership role. We are pleased to welcome Albridge Solutions to the roster of visionary companies worldwide that are using Egenera technology to improve business performance and better serve their customers."
Ask executives at Albridge Solutions what gives the Inc. 500 company its competitive advantage, and the answer is definitive: technology. A developer and hoster of Web-based software that consolidates customer data for financial institutions, Albridge earned Inc.'s No. 32 slot for 2005 based on revenue growth over the past three years. The company attributes this remarkable expansion largely to its investments in IT, including development of its proprietary Albridge Wealth Reporting solution and the datacenter infrastructure that powers this unique application.
"Clients choose Albridge for two reasons: the quality and availability of the data we provide," explained Rao Pallepati, vice president of information systems and security, Albridge. "Our software is used by 100 financial-services firms representing $850 billion in assets and servicing 60,000 financial advisors. To deliver the results these customers demand, we invest in technologies that differentiate us from the competition. At Albridge, technology isn't an add-on to our business; it is the foundation of our business. And we're committed to doing it better than anyone else."
One of the leading-edge technologies being leveraged at Albridge is virtualization, defined by Pallepati as the ability to automatically repurpose and reallocate computing resources on an as-needed basis. In moving to a virtualized environment, the company also wanted to replace its proprietary RISC/UNIX machines with the x86 architecture running Linux®. After evaluating offerings from multiple providers, Albridge chose the Egenera BladeFrame system as its virtualization platform.
"When we started down this path, we knew there were two directions we could take: build it ourselves or source an integrated solution," Pallepati recalls. "We could buy a hundred white boxes and get them working, but we knew the physical complexity and manageability challenges would be overwhelming. Next, we looked at traditional blade servers from the two largest providers and found that, because they're based on a legacy server design, neither of these products can virtualize resources. Alternatively, Egenera's diskless blades enable us to repurpose servers in minutes based on application demand, quantifiably improving IT responsiveness to the business."
The Egenera BladeFrame has helped Albridge improve competitiveness through technology in several ways, including:
Virtualization: Wealth Reporting is a classic three-tier application with Oracle at the database layer, BEA WebLogic at the application layer, and a customer portal at the Web layer. Since Egenera Processing Blade™ modules are stateless and anonymous, Albridge can run any tier on any blade at any time based on demand. The company also maintains two spare blades in the frame to make failover and incremental capacity immediately available to all three layers.
"With our old equipment every piece of hardware had a fixed identity, locking services and capacity into silos," noted Pallepati. "The Egenera BladeFrame breaks the one application/one server model IT shops have struggled with for years, enabling new levels of agility and utilization."
Availability: "Ensuring that Wealth Reporting is up and running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is our number-one priority here in IT," reports Pallepati. "With our client base, we simply cannot have downtime." A fully redundant architecture ensures that Egenera BladeFrame components, both hardware and software, have backups. Likewise, the system safeguards application availability through N+1 hardware failover based on virtualization.
Management: New Jersey-based Albridge houses its Egenera BladeFrame systems with Data Return, a leading provider of managed services for mission-critical applications. As a result, all management is performed remotely. Moreover, Egenera PAN Manager™ software provides a single console for managing all 24 virtual servers in a BladeFrame system. According to Pallepati, managing a single frame rather than dozens of discrete machines has lowered system administration requirements and overall management costs.
Simplicity: Both Albridge and Data Return were impressed by the physical simplicity of the Egenera BladeFrame system, which consolidates redundant connections to power, networks and storage for 24 servers into as few as eight cables. Says Pallepati, "In the time it takes to configure a single legacy server, we've deployed 24 Egenera Processing Blades." Through virtualization, Egenera has also replaced 80 percent of server hardware components with software, lowering costs and improving reliability by eliminating failure points.
Time to Market: The Egenera BladeFrame is enabling Albridge to get customers up and running faster than ever before. "Deployment for new clients is much simpler now," says Pallepati. "All we do is pop in a blade versus getting the space, buying the hardware, securing it and all the other steps required with legacy systems." Faster time to market means competitive advantage for Albridge clients. Likewise, virtual resources can be shared among clients, improving utilization and lowering costs for both Albridge and its customers.
Savings: Albridge performed a thorough TCO/ROI analysis for each system it considered. While the Egenera BladeFrame's upfront capital cost was higher than that of other platforms, its total cost of ownership—including deployment, management and third-party software expenses—was lower, justifying the investment.
Concludes Pallepati: "Our technology is very important to our clients. Because it can both lower their costs and get their applications to market faster, they specifically want to hear that we're doing virtualization. We've presented our Egenera BladeFrame deployment at several client conferences, to a very good response. By staying one step ahead of our competitors, we're able to help our clients do the same. Albridge views the Egenera BladeFrame system as a key contributor to our strategies for both market differentiation and customer delight."
Albridge Solutions is the leading provider of enterprise data management (EDM) and web-based portfolio accounting and performance reporting solutions to the financial services industry. Financial institutions and advisors including investment management firms, insurance companies, banks, Registered Investment Advisors, and independent, insurance and bank broker-dealers rely on Albridge for the high quality consolidated data they need to succeed. Albridge Solutions consolidates account information from hundreds of data sources encompassing thousands of product companies and makes this valuable customer data readily accessible to many leading financial institutions and advisors. Using patent-pending technology, Albridge Solutions collects, cleanses and normalizes the transaction and position-level securities data it receives from settlement and clearing firms, data custodians, product companies and internal proprietary systems. This data is then used to power Albridge Wealth Reporting, our web-based portfolio accounting and performance reporting solution in use at over 100 financial services firms representing over $850 billion in assets, 60,000 financial advisors and millions of investors. Financial Institutions can also choose to receive cleansed and consolidated information via Albridge Web Services or Albridge Replicated Data Services to support enterprise level initiatives such as data-mining, CRM, compliance monitoring and other mission critical business applications. For more information, contact Chris Farber at sales@albridge.com.
Press Contacts: Nancy Keswani
Egenera, Inc.
508-858-2605
nkeswani@egenera.com
Wayne St. Amand
Greenough Communications
617-275-6519
wstamand@greenoughcom.com
Egenera is a global leader in delivering computing solutions that simplify datacenter operations and infrastructure. The Egenera BladeFrame product family simplifies the datacenter with an innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business requirements. Market-leading enterprises around the world trust the Egenera BladeFrame system to run their most important business applications and achieve higher resource utilization, faster application time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices worldwide. For more information visit www.egenera.com, call 508-858-2600 or send email to info@egenera.com.
Egenera, Egenera stylized logos, BladeFrame, PAN Manager and Processing Blade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Egenera Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other product names, service marks and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
