SCIENCE

Senior executives from the Itanium industry met in San Francisco to lay out a united strategy for Itanium solution delivery with a goal of mission critical computing market segment leadership by the end of the decade. To take advantage of the growing momentum in enterprise and technical computing environments for Itanium solution deployments, industry leaders including Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys announced a collective investment of $10 billion to drive industry standard Itanium platform adoption in favor of legacy, proprietary alternatives. With Itanium platform revenue currently representing 58 percent of Sun SPARC and 33 percent of IBM Power2 market segment share, and over 6,000 applications currently running on the architecture, the momentum behind Itanium solutions is growing. "Itanium solution delivery to mission critical environments represent a new business model for enterprise and technical computing users bringing choice of hardware platform, operating system, and applications to environments which heretofore have been limited by proprietary vertical solution stacks," said Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager, IDC. "A change this substantial takes collective industry commitment and investment." The investment is comprised of planned funding of research and development, capital expenditures, sales and marketing, and ISV enabling activities. Itanium solutions have made great inroads in enterprise computing database, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence deployments as well as in a host of technical computing environments. With application support doubling within the last twelve months, Itanium solution capability continues to grow. The announcement came at the Itanium Solutions Alliance's first Executive League meeting. The meeting provided Alliance Founding Sponsor senior executives with an opportunity to strategize on the long term opportunity for delivery of Itanium solutions to the marketplace. Members discussed collective opportunities within the Itanium arena and opportunities to collaborate through Alliance programs. A global organization, the Itanium Solutions Alliance was founded in September 2005 with a mission to accelerate Itanium solution deployments. The Alliance offers a suite of developer enabling programs including Developer Days, a Solutions Center Network and the recently launched Itanium Solutions Catalog, the first public listing of software applications available on Itanium 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 best-in-breed computing solutions. More information about the Alliance, programs and membership can be found at www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org.