Johannesburg, 28 May 2007
A mass collaboration of industry players to open up new opportunities and educate customers in the server industry - known as Blade.Org - is gaining momentum.
Blade.Org, now into its second year, is an initiative spearheaded by IBM and includes over 100 members. "It's about quickly generating a response to a customer problem," explains Doug Balog, VP of IBM's BladeCenter development team.
The 100 members play in niche fields, such as integration and infrastructure solutions, storage, servers, networking, power delivery and semiconductors, and management software tools.
With over $1 billion already invested in the organisation from venture capitalists excited at the prospect of specialists combining to create new solutions, Balog sees Blade.Org going from "strength to strength".
Though HP is notably absent from the community, Balog explains the mission of Blade.Org is to "provide leadership to the Blade server market and foster a collaborative community of customers and members to expand the Blade ecosystem".
He says one excellent example of where the project has worked is the Asian Art Museum, where a video surveillance and storage system was created via the combined efforts of Avnet, Blade Network Technologies, DataCom and IBM.
"Three trends will fuel the Blade market's growth: open architecture, mass collaboration and venture capital investment," he says.