Alatum, which resulted from a collaboration between Singapore Computer Systems (SCS) and HP, will deliver computing power, storage and software applications on an on-demand, online basis, SCS said.

The launch followed the Singaporean government's award of the national Grid Service Provisioning project to the SCS-HP consortium in June 2008. According to HP, the award marked the start of local grid services commercialization and an industry-government partnership to promote wider grid adoption among organizations.

20 global and local grid computing partners currently support Alatum, including Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, SingTel, and Netsuite. "The consortium seeks to increase the number of partners to 70 by end-2011," said Alvin Kok, executive vice president of SCS.

Grid computing services

According to Kok, overbuilding of IT assets has resulted in various cost drivers for enterprises. "There's a low level of capacity utilization for servers, desktops and storage," he said. "Upfront expenditures and on-going fees for software applications are other cost drivers."