INDUSTRY

CONCORD, Mass. -- HP customers considering migrating from an HP 9000 PA-RISC environment to an Intel Itanium environment may encounter a few "surprises." Just as Intel announces it newest version of its Itanium 2 architecture, technology analysis firm Clabby Analytics issued a ten-page report (called "HP's Forced Migration to Itanium", see: www.valleyviewventures.com) questioning Hewlett-Packard's plans for migrating its large PA-RISC user base to Itanium architecture. "Moving PA-RISC applications to Itanium and achieving increased performance will not be as painless as IT managers may think," says Joe Clabby, President of Clabby Analytics. Some of the report highlights include: 1) Clabby Analytics believes that HP customers considering migrating from an HP 9000 PA-RISC environment to an Intel Itanium environment are in for a few "surprises." Such as: a) Performance improvements in custom applications are not likely when moving to Itanium, even with HP's binary compatibility claim because RISC applications will be run differently on Itanium EPIC architecture; b) Emulation mode performs poorly today (although HP is working with Intel to improve this) -- but IT managers usually shy away from running applications on emulators; and, c) IT buyers may have to wait (years?) until their packaged applications can run on EPIC architecture because very few packaged applications(around 300) are available on Intel's new EPIC architecture (the explicitly parallel instruction computing architecture that drives Itanium). 2) Clabby Analytics thinks that the point in migrating is to achieve performance - and moving custom RISC code to Itanium does not necessarily enable HP customers to achieve any performance benefits. 3) HP customers may be better off moving to another RISC architecture such as SUN's UltraSPARC (12,000 applications) or IBM POWER (16,000 applications) in order to secure a RISC growth path on proven RISC- based technologies. 4) Given HP's poor positioning in business process reengineering professional services and its declining headcount, Clabby Analytics questions whether HP PA-RISC customers should continue to consider HP their strategic partner.