SYSTEMS

The Itanium Solutions Alliance today announced significant momentum in multiple areas, including worldwide growth of Itanium-based systems, updates on its partnership with Microsoft, a new agreement with Sophos and a technology preview of Sun Microsystems Java 6.0 on Itanium-based servers. Worldwide, annual Itanium-based factory system revenue and system volume continued to grow solidly in 2007, with a year-over-year increase of 30.8 and 36.3 percent, respectively. The Asia-Pacific region led the way with year-over-year growth in factory system revenue and system volume of 61 and 45 percent. In EMEA (Western Europe, Central Eastern Europe and Middle East Africa), factory system revenue and volume experienced 35.4 percent and 56.3 percent growth, respectively. Itanium-based factory system revenue grew 35 percent and in the Americas region (US, Canada and Latin America) continued to make progress with 27 percent system volume growth and 41 percent in factory system revenue increases. “Based on our most recent reports, Intel Itanium architecture is now the fastest growing server processor type in the world and is continuing to help drive the growth of the worldwide server market,” said Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President of IDC’s Enterprise Platform Group. The Alliance and Microsoft have been collaborating in multiple areas to drive the adoption of mission-critical computing with Itanium-based servers running Windows Server. More customers recognize the business value of deploying Windows Server workloads on Intel Itanium industry standard servers, for higher levels of scalability, reliability and flexibility. Together, they are working closely to deliver new programs and tools to help businesses migrate from aging and costly legacy RISC systems and mainframes to more cost-effective and agile Itanium-based platforms. Currently, one-quarter of the more than 13,000 Itanium-based applications are Windows Server-based, and customers are seeing the investment protection of enterprise Windows Server solutions running on Itanium for their mission-critical workloads. The two organizations have also been actively engaged in a targeted initiative for the financial services industry, which promotes the Microsoft operating system and Itanium-based platform solution to the core banking industry as a preferred platform for their mission-critical applications. The campaign launched in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and is slated to start in Western Europe mid-year and culminate at the SIBOS conference in Vienna in the fall. Microsoft is partnering with key banking software package providers including Alliance charter members SAP, Lansa, Open Solutions, Fair Isaac Corporation, FircoSoft, Slater Labs, and Alliance platform providers, to support banks and other financial services organizations wanting to transition off their costly legacy mainframes to Itanium-based systems. Microsoft, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions recently pledged its support in a public statement around its .NET Framework stating it is “excited to work with the members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance and is continuing to further enhance the performance of the .NET Framework on Intel Itanium architecture.” Alliance Founders are also recording a number of Windows and Itanium-based achievements:

• Fujitsu announced that its PRIMEQUEST 580A posted the fastest results in the industry on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark on a system running Microsoft Windows Server and the SAP ERP application Release 6.0.
• The first TPC-H at 10TB performance benchmark published with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Itanium-based HP Integrity servers.
• In February, NEC announced the industry’s first enterprise server with dynamic hardware partitioning functionality for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 – the NEC Express5800/1320Xf. Additionally, the company’s recently published world-record TPC-E benchmark result on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition is a clear indicator that Windows-based solutions on the Itanium-based platform are excellent forward-looking choices for enterprise customers.

The Alliance’s work with Sun Microsystems continues and their combined efforts were showcased at the recent JavaOne conference with a technology preview that showed Itanium-optimized Java SE 6 running on an Itanium-based server in several different SOA scenarios. “This is an important step to increase the availability of Java-based software and broaden solutions choices for users of Intel Itanium architecture,” noted Joan Jacobs, Itanium Solutions Alliance executive director. The Alliance has also reached agreement with Sophos (www.sophos.com), a world leader in IT security and control, for a Q4 2008 release of Sophos Anti-Virus for Linux on Itanium-based systems for Red Hat EL 4.x and Red Hat EL 5.x. “We are pleased to work with the Alliance on an Itanium-based solution that will expand the opportunity for business, education and government organizations to exercise complete protection and control against known and unknown security threats,” said Steve Munford, CEO of Sophos. Sophos also supports HP-UX, OpenVMS and Windows on Itanium-based systems.