Because we only had 30 minutes to speak with S&P CIO Joe Held at Smart Enterprise Exchange in NY on Feb. 1, we didn't get to hear all the amazing things they're doing amidst their 4-year long IT transformation project. He hit on some amazing highlights, including their global federated approach to app dev that was facilitated by leveraging virtualization and standardizing app dev best practices across regions. But we didn't have time to get into a lot of the details behind this virtualized strategy. What Joe told me as we prepped for the event is that S&P is using a grid platform as a shared capability that their analytical engines can access from anywhere around the world and across businesses -- when S&P needs excess capacity during peak periods, they engage a third-party provider, and they're planning to have an external grid cloud provide the same interfaces to their applications as their internal cloud does. It not only saves them money, but provides the capacity and scalability they need in the event of a market-moving event.