The Itanium Solutions Alliance announced the availability of 10,000 applications running on Itanium 2-based platforms. This number represents over 50 percent growth in applications available in the year since the Alliance was formed. Highlighting the momentum of application availability, Oracle today announced that it will work with the Alliance in its certification of Oracle software on Itanium-based platforms, which includes extensive regression testing and performance optimization. “Oracle is committed to delivering its industry-leading infrastructure software products for the Itanium platform,” said Prem Kumar, vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle. “In keeping with our long-standing tradition of presenting customers with many choices in deployment platforms, Oracle plans to certify the next major releases of Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware across a range of operating systems for Itanium, with proven Oracle performance, availability, and security.” “The industry has hit a major milestone with application availability exceeding 10,000” said Michel Lepert, executive vice president and general manager of Bull Products and Systems. “With the recent delivery of Itanium 9100 processor-based solutions to the market, and customer deployments delivering a 36 percent increase in Itanium system revenue in the last year, the industry is accelerating the transition to a new era of mission-critical computing.” These announcements came as the Itanium Solutions Alliance hosts the first Itanium Solutions Summit in San Francisco. At this event, executives from dozens of companies met to learn more about the latest Intel Itanium 2 processor developments. The Summit also provided Alliance members companies with an opportunity to network and extend partnerships to other Itanium-based solutions providers. Geared towards mission-critical computing, Itanium-based platforms continue to see a steady increase in the market. According to IDC, sales of Itanium-based systems grew 36.4 percent year over year generating $740 million in revenue for Q2 2006. Itanium-based platform revenue currently represent 43.6 percent of IBM Power market segment share and 44.9 percent of Sun SPARC. A global organization, the Itanium Solutions Alliance was founded in September 2005 with a mission to accelerate Itanium-based solution deployments through a suite of software porting and optimization tools. Alliance enabling programs include Developer Days, a Solutions Center Network and the Itanium Solutions Catalog, the first public listing of software applications available on Itanium-based platforms. Membership to the Alliance is open to any enterprise and technical software supplier looking to optimize applications for Itanium environments or enterprise and technical computing providers looking to network with other leaders in delivery of computing solutions. More information about the Alliance, programs and membership can be found at its Web site.