The Hot Seat session is aways interesting to watch because of the wide range of quality of the presentations. Luckily they are short enough so it is not getting too boring. Some products are very difficult to explain, which is a problem if your job is selling them. The Platform Grid Orchestrator is such a product. It provides a virtualisation layer in between the hardware and Grid management products like LSF and Symphony. Why do you want it as a customer? The Platform representative did not convince the inquisitors within the few minutes he was assigned. (But us mentioining the product in this place should make him happy again). The Bull presentation was very nice, but we report about that seperately.

This morning I was able to visit a few additional booths at the Exhibition. Unfortunately I had to skip some presentations for that. T-systems was interesting. They provide CFD services to customers and have a Grid portal (Called HPC Portal) already operational for many years. Within a European funded project UniGrids, they developed that a bit further. The project has just finished and provides a means to automatically connect to a Grid without the need to go to a web site and to log-on. Of course you need a certificate for authentication. Nice feature is that is not dependent on specific Grid middelware: it works with Unicore, but is standards based.

At the Scali booth I learned that marketing is done in the US these days, and not from Oslo. A pity, because it looses much of its European touch in that way.

I finally got in contact with a lady at the Microsoft booth responsible for marketing. I spent 20 minutes waiting yesterday at the booth for her, using that time to get a technical update from a Cluster Server expert. (I am not sure whether she let me waiting on purpose, assuring that I would get enough technical information. Probably she was just too busy). The Cluster Server software is very limited in functionality today. The costs are very high: about 400 euro per node. I wonder how many people will actually buy it for that price. Comparable products on Linux range from free to perhaps 150 euro per node.