Recently we unveiled Trading Grid 2007 with a suite of new capabilities.  As we move all of our global customers to Trading Grid Ultra Infrastructure over the next couple of years, the benefits will be tremendous.  Our Ultra Infrastructure – based on eGenera – has been live and in production for nearly nine months now after two years of development and testing and the results are stellar. 

Today, the entire technology industry continues to tout availability metrics solely based on measuring unplanned operational outages but conveniently ignoring planned service interruptions, or service ‘windows.’   We plan to change this thinking. 

The business impact from any downtime – planned or unplanned – is significant.  Today’s supply chains are increasingly global and depend on real-time continuous flow of information.  Increasingly, there will be no convenient time for ‘upgrade’ interruptions. 

When I recently reviewed the results measuring planned downtime so far this year on our new integration platform technology versus older platforms, the results are very encouraging.   This year our planned downtime for our Trading Grid Messaging Services has been only five hours total.  This compares to an average of 100 hours or more across our well-oiled mainframe based systems so far this year.  A dramatic reduction of planned downtime by nearly 95%.  

Our lead technical architects credit a loosely-coupled architecture with diverse and redundant components throughout supported by a high-performance switch fabric and software virtualization. 

While we all know eliminating planned and unplanned downtime is a grand ambition, it is great to see the fruits of our investments proving we can get very, very close.

I know, I know I am late getting this going.  My PR team hounds me daily.  So here goes…