Quadruples Revenue, Doubles Customers, and Earns Microsoft ISV Innovation Award
What makes Windows apps run faster and scale even bigger? Do we have your interest yet? This is what Digipede’s value proposition is all about. Founded in 2003, Digipede Technologies provides grid computing solutions for the Microsoft .NET Framework. The company set out to solve the oldest problem in information technology—the need for greater application performance. With its solution, the Digipede Network, the company achieves the benefits of distributed computing without the steep learning curve, expensive consultants, and wrenching organizational changes associated with competing grid technologies and projects. Nearly half of its business is in the financial services sector, in areas such as computational finance. Explains John Powers, Digipede’s Founder and CEO, “These folks [in computational finance] do risk management, asset pricing and trading analytics—they can literally turn CPU cycles into money. So if you give them the ability to very easily get their algorithms running not on one machine, but on hundreds or even thousands of machines without a lot of retraining or retooling, then they’ll eat it up. And that’s what we’ve seen especially among asset managers and hedge funds—those guys have a bottomless pit of need for more computational horsepower.” And unlike other solutions, right from the start Digipede set out to specialize on a single platform. Says Powers, “We decided to specialize on Windows and integrate deeply along the whole Microsoft technology stack. So it’s not just the operating system, we also integrate with SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, SharePoint, etc., all along the line so that companies can take advantage of Microsoft’s unique value proposition while scaling out to hundreds or thousands of CPUs. We were the first to offer this distributed computing solution based entirely on the Microsoft .NET Framework.”
The Microsoft Connection?
While Digipede says the relationship with EBT and Microsoft product groups has been very helpful, it says the most important relationships have turned out to be directly with the field sales organizations, especially in financial services, an area where Microsoft has a strong market share position. The company has worked closely with the Microsoft Financial Services group in New York City on joint lead generation, sales opportunities, and actually pitching and getting business together. According to Powers, “The Microsoft partner community has also been critical, and I believe it is one of Microsoft’s underappreciated assets in the IT world. I know Microsoft understands the value of the partner ecosystem, but a lot of the rest of the world doesn’t understand that Microsoft partners are an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft itself—that’s where the real value of selecting the Microsoft platform really comes from.”
Where are they now?
Digipede has seen its revenue quadruple and number of customers double in just the last 18 months alone. Says Powers, “We’re growing very, very rapidly, and a lot of that is due to our deeper integration on the Microsoft platform than other companies are able to provide. “ In July 2007, Digipede won the 2007 ISV Innovation Partner of the Year award from Microsoft. And in February 2008, it plans to be at the Microsoft launch event for Windows Server 2008, and be one of the first companies certified. Next, it plans to focus on Windows HPC Server 2008 for high-performance computing, and further down the road on Microsoft Parallel Extensions to.NET Framework 3.5. Explains Powers, “We’re very excited about this because it points to Microsoft’s entree into the multi-core processing space, and that’s important to us. We already handle multi-core for our customers for certain development patterns, but there are so many different cases for which customers will have to move to a multi-core development framework, and we can’t possibly handle them all.”
For more information, visit Digipede online, or see the case study "Grid Computing Turns .NET into Enterprise Powerhouse."
