May 01, 2007 13:00 ET

Blade.org Establishes Global Customer Advisory Council to Guide Blade Standard and Future Solutions

ST. LOUIS, MO -- (MARKET WIRE) -- May 1, 2007 -- PartnerWorld 2007 -- Today at the IBM (NYSE: IBM) PartnerWorld 2007 Conference, Blade.org, the industry group driving innovation in blade-based solutions, announced the establishment of its Global Customer Advisory Council. This Council consists of executives representing a wide range of organizations and industries relying on blade solutions. The group will provide valuable perspective and insight into the development of future blade solutions.

"Blade.org was founded to foster a multi-vendor forum focused on providing solutions that benefit blade customers. The creation of the Global Customer Advisory Council is another significant step towards ensuring customers have a strong voice in the future direction of the blade platform ecosystem," said Richard Martin, director worldwide OEM operations of VMware, Inc. and governing board member of Blade.org. "By soliciting customers from diverse industries such as non-profits, academia, healthcare, entertainment and financial arenas, Blade.org is harnessing a broad spectrum of customer input that will serve as the genesis for accelerated collaborative innovation leading to higher-value customer solutions."

The Blade.org Global Customer Advisory Council held its first meeting at the Blade Systems Insight conference in April and will continue to meet monthly to share its recommendations with Blade.org board members.

Blade.org Global Customer Advisory Council members include:

--  Asian Art Museum of San Francisco - James Horio, Director of
    Information Technology
--  Batteries Plus - Josh Moore, Director of IT Operations
--  CHA, LLC - William B. Cox, Chief Information Officer
--  Countrywide Financial - Karl Kay, IT Office of Architecture,
    Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture
--  Georgia Institute of Technology - Bartosz Ilkowski, Ph.D., Senior
    Research Technologist and Head of Cluster Computing at the Center for the
    Study of Systems Biology
--  Online Game Services Inc. - James Hursthouse, CEO
--  Technicolor - Tom Burns, Director of Post Production Infrastructure
--  University of Kentucky - John Tibe, Director, Enterprise Computing &
    Communications Systems
--  W3i.com - Kyle Ohme, Director of Information Technology
--  Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute - Phil Butcher, Head of Information
    Technology
--  Zumiez - Kevin Sonney, Technology Systems Manager
--  60East Technologies - Jeffrey Birnbaum, Founder (Former Managing
    Director and Chief Technical Architect of Morgan Stanley)
    

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the largest independent charity in the UK and the second largest medical research charity in the world, the Sanger Institute is a genome research institute working to understand gene function in health and disease and to generate data and resources of lasting value to biomedical research.

"Blade computing is an integral part of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute's IT infrastructure. Over the past few years we have implemented many iterations of high density compute farms ranging from several hundred 1U high servers to today's multi-socket, multi-core blades yielding thousands of compute cores. Blade technology is critical for us," said Phil Butcher, head of information technology for Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We welcome the opportunity to work with Blade.org to have input to this evolving technology as it continues to be ever more vital in our operation as it is also becoming across a wide range of the IT industry."

About Blade.org

Blade.org is a collaborative organization and developer community focused on accelerating the development and adoption of blade server solutions. The organization provides leadership to the blade market and fosters a thriving industry ecosystem focused on delivering valuable solutions to blade computing customers. For more information, visit the organization online at www.blade.org.