Platform Computing has always been an interesting company to watch. They have been part of the Grid game since before the words “Grid” and “Computing” were used together, and they have supported themselves entirely through customer sales with no money from venture funding.Platform CEO Songnian Zhou is adept at keeping the driving forces behind the company fresh while staying true to the ideals that have been the foundation of the company since its inception. I believe this is illustrated well in this article in IT Week.Zhou uses the term virtualization to explain how the focus of Platform’s EGO software is to “help firms orchestrate and manage grid services” as CIOs turn their focus from managing a collection of individual boxes to managing the datacenter as a virtual environment. This is very similar to what he said way back in January in this interview with the Globus Consortium Journal. “The killer app for grid is not the components of applications – ERP, CRM – but the connection of all of these components of enterprise applications to form business processes.” In other words, it’s not the individual applications but their aggregation in a virtual environment that unleashes their true power, that of driving business processes. As Zhou states “Even the grid buzzwords are short for other buzzwords so if we focus on the business need than the rest doesn’t matter.” If Platform wants virtualization to mean dynamic system management to speed business processes then I say more power to them. And if it inspires others to use made up words like “virtualocity”, even better. Technology Industry