Executive Summary
Albridge Solutions has migrated from proprietary RISC/UNIX servers to the Egenera®
BladeFrame® system running Linux® on x86 processors. Initially, IT considered building
a virtualized environment from white boxes, but found that complexity and management
would be overwhelming. Blade servers from the industry’s largest vendors were also ruled
out since their legacy architectures made virtualization and resource sharing impossible.
Today, with the Egenera BladeFrame, Albridge can run any application on any blade at
any time based on demand, breaking the one application/one server model IT shops have
struggled with for years.
Business Challenge
Ask executives at Albridge Solutions what gives the Inc. 500 company its competitive advantage, and
the answer is definitive: technology. A developer and hoster of Web-based software that consolidates
customer data for financial institutions, Albridge earned Inc.’s No. 32 slot for 2005 based on revenue
growth over the past three years. The company attributes this remarkable expansion largely to its
investments in IT, including development of its proprietary Albridge Wealth Reporting solution and
the datacenter infrastructure that powers this unique application.
“Clients choose Albridge for two reasons: the quality and availability of the data we provide,” explains
Rao Pallepati, vice president of information systems and security, Albridge. “Our software is used by
100 financial-services firms representing $850 billion in assets and servicing 60,000 financial advisors.
To deliver the results these customers demand, we invest in technologies that differentiate us from
the competition. At Albridge, technology isn’t an add-on to our business; it is the foundation of our
business. And we’re committed to doing it better than anyone else.”
One of the leading-edge technologies being leveraged at Albridge is virtualization, defined by Pallepati
as the ability to automatically repurpose and reallocate computing resources on an as-needed basis.
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