GCJ: Tell us about Digipede. Who you are, what you do, products, what makes you unique?

Powers: Digipede Technologies delivers grid computing software that dramatically improves application performance by distributing execution across a network of Windows desktops, servers, and cluster nodes. Built entirely on .NET, the Digipede Network works with Microsoft tools including Excel and Visual Studio, and is radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use than other grid systems.

We work with customers who have no patience for long "grid enablement" consulting projects, who believe "computing" and "grid computing" need not be different disciplines. We think grid computing solutions need to work at any scale - so it's as important to scale down gracefully to five or ten nodes as it is to scale up to five or ten thousand. Our customers range in size from a ten-person small business to the US Army.

Our focus on the Microsoft platform enables us to integrate more deeply with the Microsoft stack; as a result, we can bring the power of grid computing to a far wider range of applications. The benefits of this focused approach range from ease of administration and deployment to familiarity of use - but the biggest benefit is in the use of a familiar programming model.

GCJ: Our President, Greg Nawrocki, is calling for 2007 to be the year of the Grid Application - your thoughts on what that means and how it happens?

Powers: Greg and I certainly agree with the observation that the grid community needs to do a vastly better job in paying attention to applications if grid adoption is ever going to take off.

In our view, the best way to do this is to provide the best tools available where developers need them most. The Digipede Network includes the critically-acclaimed Digipede Framework SDK, which allows developers to adapt their applications to the grid in a familiar, object-oriented paradigm using the familiar Visual Studio development environment. This is a big deal. If grid is ever going to reach its full potential, it has to "disappear," or at least become less of a giant threshold for applications and application developers to cross. If developers have to think and work differently to build grid applications, that's a huge loss of productivity. We make sure developers can work the same way when they build applications for the grid as they do when they build any other application.

So Digipede's contribution to the Year of the Grid Application is making the process of building "grid applications" vastly more natural, vastly more similar to building "non-grid applications."

GCJ: You suggest using Grid Computing to scale Excel Services, why is that important and how does it get accomplished?

Powers: Microsoft's done some amazing things with the releases of both Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007. Spreadsheets contain a lot of the intellectual property of many organizations, but they're not considered "enterprise software" because you've got version control nightmares and a difficult collaboration model. Now, using Excel Services, you can publish a spreadsheet to your entire enterprise in a secure fashion, and give users specific privileges regarding what they can and can't change. So you can take a spreadsheet built by your smartest analyst, which might contain your company's best methods for, say, calculating the price of exotic derivatives, and in a few seconds publish it for use by your whole company. And you can enable programmatic access to that spreadsheet via Web Services, so you can make that pricing logic available to other applications in your enterprise. This is a really big deal for a lot of companies.

But a complex spreadsheet used by a single user can peg a high-end workstation for seconds, or minutes, or hours for that matter, depending on the calculations being performed. If you want to expose that spreadsheet to much higher and more variable usage, you need a scalability strategy that allows dynamic allocation of resources to this high and uncertain load. That's where the Digipede Network comes in. With just a few lines of code, you can deploy the Digipede Network behind SharePoint, and scale out the compute-intensive calculations in your spreadsheet. We're seeing a ton of interest in this.

GCJ: What's next for Grid applications then after Excel?

Powers: Well, there are 450 million Excel users out there, and there's reason to think more than a percent of them might want grid capabilities behind them. So after the next few million grid customers, well, users are bringing more and more applications to us all the time.

Enterprise customers have made a huge commitment to .NET over the past six years; .NET continues to dominate J2EE and other options for enterprise application developers. The advantages offered by .NET are huge in terms of developer productivity and support - but the scalability tools, particularly for compute-intensive applications, are limited. The Digipede Network provides the best general-purpose middle-tier scalability toolset for .NET today. So enterprise .NET applications are probably the largest market we see.

Web applications ("Web 2.0" or otherwise) have relied on network load balancing to scale for a long time now - but for the increasingly rich, CPU-intensive applications being deployed today, you need a grid solution. Some of our customers have deployed the Digipede Network behind public and private Web servers to improve the responsiveness and quality of service of compute-intensive online applications.

Image processing is a growing area for us; the military has lots of applications in this area, but there are also increasing uses of image processing and pattern recognition in commercial applications.

We did a deal last quarter with a visual effects studio in Hollywood, and that has generated a lot of interest as well. We hear the same thing others do - that video work is all done on Linux or Macs - but that turns out to be wrong. Excluding a few really big shops, most of the visual effects work seems to be happening on Windows, for good reason - support for drivers is better, entry points are lower, incremental admin expenses are lower, and integration with line-of-business applications is better. This last point is what made the difference for our work with Digital Dimension - they wanted to unify control of multiple separate rendering packages, and get visibility into their whole production pipeline directly in their management dashboards. This gives them much greater IT agility, so they can be responsive to the changing needs of their multiple demanding clients.

GCJ: What about platforms for grid applications? What's your take?

Powers: Well it's been a UNIX and Linux world for the last few years, and now that's changing, isn't it? As Microsoft has committed more resources to high-performance computing (especially with their new Compute Cluster Server), customers are seeing the benefits to bringing "computing" and "grid computing" together.

GCJ: What about professional services for Grid applications? How much of this is to be outsourced versus done in-house?

Powers: This is another area where we're pretty heretical. I have nothing against consultants - I'm a recovering consultant myself - but the Grid market has been so heavy on consulting we think there's room to reduce that. As we strip away the needless complexity in Grid offerings, we help our customers make a more straightforward decision - the outsourcing decision for Grid becomes more like the outsourcing decision for anything else. You may still decide to outsource professional services for grid applications - but that's more like a decision for any application now. There's not this aura that "grid" needs to be so much more complex than any other type of development or deployment work.

GCJ: How do you see Virtualization and SOA fitting into the Grid application mix?

Powers: I think in 2006 virtualization finally made it to the top of my list of least favorite words. It now means so many things that it has eclipsed grid in marketing hype and silliness - no mean feat. We work at what's sometimes called the "application virtualization" layer; this market is growing very rapidly, although hardware and OS virtualization get more press. We work with customers who use the Digipede Network in VMs as a way to deploy more efficiently, and we view technologies in that area as complementary to our own.

As for SOA, we've done a lot more in that area. As applications are built more modularly as services, and as those services are exposed to multiple users and applications, scalability concerns emerge right away. A scalability strategy is fundamental to any SOA strategy, and we provide that for our customers. Our CTO, Robert W. Anderson, and our Director of Products, Daniel Ciruli, wrote a great article in last month's Dr. Dobb's Journal about that.

I'll give you an example. Earlier this year we worked with a big financial services company -- an asset manager with a suite of analytic routines they use for a variety of computational finance chores. This suite is built with the usual assortment of technologies - some .NET, some COM, third-party libraries, and so on. They're migrating to a service-oriented architecture, so that these routines can be exposed individually as services and accessed by many applications, not just one. First this will help their internal analysts; then they'll expose relevant services to their customers via a Web portal. But again, fixed-income pricing algorithms and risk management routines are notoriously compute-intensive, and exposing them to a large and variable usage load requires the ability to deploy resources dynamically to these application workloads. The Digipede Network provides the near-linear scalability they need to support their growing user base.

GCJ: Do you have any customers or case studies that you could talk to describing real word use of Grid applications?

Powers: A very large asset manager (one of the top five hedge funds) uses the Digipede Network to scale out its entire trading analytics platform. This company manages over a hundred billion dollars in assets for some very demanding investors. They use a wide variety of computational finance algorithms to minimize correlated value at risk; they also screen every trade for opportunities to reduce transaction costs. This type of analysis is both compute- and transaction-intensive, and must be completed within very tight time constraints.

Like many financial services firms, they'd started to address this problem internally. Their technical team had developed some in-house tools for distributing calculations across a network of about 20 servers, but that system was not meeting their needs -- it was not reliable enough, and it was very difficult to maintain and expand. As a result, the lead architect there estimated that less than 20% of the applications that could be scaled out had been adapted for their internal grid -- but even so, an increasing amount of their development and IT time was being consumed by this grid infrastructure project.

They had looked at other grid systems, but did not like the changes required to adapt their existing and planned applications to the grid. They did a proof of concept project to see if the Digipede Network could meet their requirements. They budgeted a month for this activity, and were done in about three days. They liked the results, did a "rip and replace" of their existing in-house system, and now they're running a far more robust and scalable grid with about 70 servers, which they can expand as needed. They adapt new applications to the grid with little fuss, including COM and .NET applications, and additional departments have adopted the system. Most importantly, their developers can now focus on their core competency in computational finance, not grid computing infrastructure.

GCJ: What's on the docket for Digipede next year? What big announcements or developments will we see?

Powers: The big items surround Excel Services, .NET, and Microsoft Compute Cluster Server. As Microsoft gains traction with its major software releases, we'll work with them to bring grid solutions to customers in the range of verticals we discussed above. You'll also see us do a lot more internationally - we've seen increasing interest from Europe and Asia in the past six months, and we expect that to increase in the first half of 2007.

And you'll see us do more with ISVs; there are several developers of Windows applications who have approached us about baking the Digipede Network into their offerings, so watch for that as well.

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