Bull Innovations and Web 2.0 R&D programs announced

“Bull Innovations for the Enterprise 2.0” were unveiled at the recent Summit 2008 meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. Bull presented the topic at the opening General Session, followed by a workshop where Pierre Salkazanov, Head of Bull R&D, Jim Smith and other members of the Phoenix Engineering Team discussed the projects in greater detail and provided a demonstration of some of the key solutions.

According to Pierre Salkazanov, Bull has created a new R&D section dedicated to innovation with a number of projects currently underway at Bull’s worldwide engineering centers both in the U.S. and in Europe. Among the efforts underway are:

• Information Appliances and Web 2.0 Technologies that allow a community of users to interact and share data, using multiple forms of communications, including voice, data, and video. The initial products, which were demonstrated at Summit, will be targeted for both the business and education markets (Phoenix R&D Team).
• Clusters for Business with Flexible Unified Systems Management, Virtualization, and Dynamic addition of Power when needed. This program is part of the Bull Bio Data Center initiative (Les Clayes, France Team).
• “Geometric Computing Systems” for 3D Modernization, Simulation and Visualization (Les Clayes, France Team).
• XML Database Systems – an integrated system for efficient searching in very large native XML databases (e.g., data mining example). (Les Clayes, France Team)
• Green Computing to optimize power consumption, which is also part of Bull’s Bio Data Center initiative (Les Clayes, France Team).
• Software as a Service (SaaS) – to deliver pay per use software, which Gartner Group projects as a major software trend for the future, including High Performance Computing Applications (Les Clayes and Grenoble Teams).

The objectives of Bull’s Innovation Program are to bring the latest technologies to Bull customers and help them deal with the major trends that will be impacting IT decisions in the future, including the exponential growth of networks, the proliferation of access points linking to networks, and the ever growing demand for processing power and data storage.