IBM has announced new software that allows clients to transform their existing technology infrastructures into dynamic, virtualized environments that can be more efficient to run, easier to manage and use less power and space, according to the company.

The software, ideal for use in Grid computing environments, reduces complexity and provides a central point to prioritize, manage and integrate workloads and data for enterprise processing through the intelligent matching of resources to workload requests, without human intervention.

The Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker further expands IBM's leadership in workload automation for enterprise clients by extending the capabilities of the Tivoli Workload Scheduler to virtual computing environments -- automatically clustering, scheduling and managing different types of workloads across a virtualized environment.

Clients embracing SOA can also use this technology in managing heterogeneous workloads to help accelerate the integration of batch function, where various computing jobs are submitted to queues and then scheduled for processing.

"With the Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker, IBM is in the advanced stages of our evolution toward becoming the cross-enterprise workload management backbone, capable of dynamic end-to-end scheduling across mainframe, distributed, Grid, and high performance computing environments," said Ken King, vice president of Grid computing at IBM. "This new software expands our Batch-on-Grid solution to improve business efficiency and reduce costs by automatically adapting workload execution to environment changes, distributing workloads to the best available resource across a dynamically shifting, cross-enterprise resource pool, and drastically reducing the labor intensive process of manually planning job, task and service assignments to each resource."

The adoption of Grid computing is growing, especially in the insurance and financial industries, as Grid computing enables companies to use existing physical resources instead of buying all new hardware.

The new offering expands the IBM scheduling and workload management portfolio, which includes the Tivoli Workload Scheduler, Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler and WebSphere Extended Deployment. IBM's family of workload automation offerings delivers comprehensive workload management capabilities for batch workloads, workflows, J2EE transactional applications, and parallel applications across clusters and heterogeneous grids.

The offering will be available on October 6, 2006 and can be purchased through IBM and select IBM Grid and Software Business Partners and re-sellers.

IBM Batch-on-Grid blends self-managing autonomic computing with technology borrowed from a mainstay programming technique called "batch computing," which originated in the 1950s and is still used by thousands of finance, government and industrial customers.