GOVERNMENT

Alliance membership doubles, ISV ecosystem reaches critical mass and Intel Itanium systems volume increases 40 percent worldwide: Today, the Itanium Solutions Alliance announced strong momentum in several areas, which mirrored Itanium 2-based solutions growth worldwide. Alliance membership doubled in one year with more than 200 participants now part of the effort to promote open, industry standard solutions based on Intel Itanium architecture. As the Alliance enters its third year of operation, Itanium-based solutions continue to show growth in areas such as application support, volume and market share. Intel Itanium architecture has a robust ecosystem supporting more than 12,000 applications from thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), reinforcing that it is a widely used platform. This growth will expand as the Alliance collaborates with its members on new solutions for end users. For example in 2008, the Alliance and Symantec expect to broaden data centers’ ability to detect important security events on Itanium-based systems running both Windows and Linux operating systems with Symantec Critical System Protection. The number of Itanium-based systems sold has increased 40 percent worldwide with Western Europe leading the regions at 90 percent growth; Asia-Pacific Itanium-based systems volume grew 55 percent and the Americas, 24 percent. “Itanium-based systems have made tremendous progress in the past two years, due in part to the efforts of the Itanium Solutions Alliance,” said Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President, Enterprise Platform Research for IDC. “Itanium-based solutions have strong momentum in key areas and this translates to increased sales and adoption rates, and more importantly, overall customer confidence.” In 2007, several milestones contributed to overall Alliance progress including: • The winners of the first Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award were announced in Beijing in April, recognizing their unique and innovative deployments of Itanium-based solutions from all areas of computing and research; • In May, Intel and Sun collaborated to deliver Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) for Itanium-based systems; • The Alliance joined the Mainframe Migration Alliance in July; and • The Alliance welcomed its 200th member in August.