GOVERNMENT

Itanium Solutions Alliance to award $50,000 cash prizes for ultimate solutions: The Itanium Solutions Alliance today announced the launch of the second Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award. The annual program recognizes unique and innovative deployments of Itanium 2-based solutions from all areas of computing and research. The judging panel for the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award is comprised of 11 industry experts and analysts. End users and developers of Itanium-based applications can enter their solution in one of three areas to be considered for each category’s $50,000 cash prize. Contest entries are due February 29, 2008 with category winners announced later in the spring. The award categories are:

• Humanitarian Impact: The Humanitarian Impact category awards the innovative use of applications running on Itanium-based systems where these systems demonstrate an impact on humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts. Examples include weather prediction, storm monitoring, tsunami model forecasting, and genetic and medical research.
• Enterprise Business Application: The Enterprise Business category awards the creative use of applications utilizing the benefits of the Intel Itanium architecture to produce either hard business results (such as cost savings and ROI) or soft business impact (including customer satisfaction and new product development).
• Entrepreneurial Innovation: This award is open to all entities excluding public companies with revenues exceeding US $25 million in the last reporting period. The award recognizes enhanced business operations using applications that take full advantage of the Intel Itanium architecture and rewards achievements in areas such as IT consolidation, increased ROI or customer satisfaction, and new product development.

Innovation Award judges include:

• Diane Bryant, vice president of Digital Enterprise Group and general manager of Server Platforms Group for Intel Corporation
• Jody Canavan, founder and president of Launch International
• Peter Chubb, research officer for the Gelato Federation at the University of New South Wales and senior research engineer of NICTA
• Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group
• Michael Fauscette, program vice president, applications at IDC
• Barb Goldworm, president and chief analyst at Focus Consulting
• Nirav Merchant, director of biotechnology computing at Arizona Research Laboratories
• Dan Reger, senior product manager for Microsoft Windows Server Marketing
• Clay Ryder, technology analyst, vice president & head of research at Sageza Group
• Larry Smarr, professor of technology at University of California San Diego and founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
• Mark K. Smith, managing director of the Gelato Foundation

The panel will judge entries on a number of criteria such as degree of difficulty, results produced and originality. Last year’s winners include Stony Brook University in the Humanitarian Impact category, Royal London Group in Enterprise Business and Secure64 in Entrepreneurial Innovation. For information about the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award and to download an application, visit its Web site.