Enterprises tend to be more comfortable with packaged software offerings, so forming OEM partnerships with ISVs is the logical way to gain traction in those businesses, according to Platform Computing CEO Songnian Zhou.

Zhou pointed to Platform's partnership with SAS Institute, announced last fall, as an example of the company's enterprise strategy.

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It's only a matter of time before grid computing—linking smaller servers together to create a high-end server environment that is dynamic and flexible, and managed like a larger high-end system—moves from the high-performance technical computing arena and into mainstream enterprises, Zhou said in an interview with eWEEK.

Click here to read about Sun's push into grid computing.

Most of the company's 13 years have been spent selling its products—such as its LSF and Symphony workload processing and scheduling software—directly into the HPTC space and to early adopters in such areas as financial services and life sciences, where customers are more comfortable with the idea of sharing computers, Zhou said.

The question now, he said, is, "going forward, can the grid environment … be applied to enterprise applications" such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management)?

Enterprises currently aren't rushing to immediately change the way they run their entire IT infrastructure, Zhou said. However, there is interest in creating such a distributed environment, he said.

"Nobody is ready to embrace the big vision," he said. "But everyone is interested in examining the first step. … Just do the projects and expand the scope, step by step."

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Platform Computing Looks to ISVs to Open Enterprise Doors