The Itanium Solutions Blog

I want to talk about the innovation happening in APAC and the 2009 Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards. Last year, two member companies from APAC, namely Protegesoft and S7 Software, were winners in two out of the three categories. While I did expect that APAC companies would do well at the awards (I have met many with very innovative applications), I certainly did not expect to find two winners from APAC. I hope that after last year’s success, we will get even more submissions this year from APAC companies and that APAC will provide at least one winner this year. (I wanted to say that APAC will provide all the winners this year but that might incur the “wrath” of my other colleagues in the US and EMEA.

The Alliance extended the deadline to submit for this award to June 3rd. If you are developing a submission and need assistance, I suggest an email to awards@itaniumsolutions.com.

I also wanted to share that I finally caught the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” two weeks ago (yes, I am a little behind with my movies)… and no, I am not going to start gushing about how great the movie was (you have all heard and read about that already). What a great story though, written by an Indian - very creative.

And in the context of what I mention above – not only can Asians write great stories; we can also develop great application software… even better when it takes advantage of the capabilities inherent on an Itanium based system.

Here’s to another Asian winner in the ISA Innovation Awards - Go APAC!

Last week Intel announced a delay in the shipment of its next generation Itanium processor, code-named Tukwila, until the first quarter of  2010. While this news is disappointing to some industry observers, it will have a minimal impact on the work the Alliance is doing this year. We are currently hard at work reviewing applications for the 2009 Innovation Awards program and creating new Itanium-focused content in support of our Q2 technology theme, Data Center Modernization which includes IT Consolidation as well as mainframe migration opportunities for which Itanium is particularly well suited.

The fundamental strengths of the Itanium architecture remain its reliability, availability, and serviceability features (RAS) that are fundamental to mission-critical computing. Customers continue to extol the tangible benefits and results their Itanium-based solutions deliver. And based on the latest data from IDC and Gartner, demand for current generation of Itanium processors is strong.

The Alliance looks forward to working with Intel and its key OEMs in support of the Tukwila launch next year and in continuing to serve as a central source for Itanium successes, content, and resources. For more information on the Tukwila delay, see the following articles in CNET by Gordon Haff and vnunet.com by David Neal.

2008 Humanitarian Winner: University of Houston

The deadline for entries is June 3rd, 2009.

Don’t miss this opportunity to nominate a worthy organization who is using Itanium to achieve impactful results. The winner in each category will receive valuable publicity, professionally produced promotional materials, and will be featured in an active campaign that showcases their solution. One category, Humanitarian Impact, includes a $50,000 cash award for the winning submission.

Visit the Innovation Awards microsite for more information.

If you have any questions at all or need help in preparing a submission, please email awards@itaniumsolutions.com.

Hello. My name is Andrey Bokhanko and I’m a compiler developer from Intel.

In my first post to the Itanium Solutions blog, I’m happy to share that a new Itanium-centric discussion forum was born! Specifically, it is devoted to all things related to Intel® Software Development Tools for Itanium architecture. Be it compilers (I work on them, so this topic is especially dear to my heart), performance tools, libraries or whatever else fancies you – if this is related to Itanium software development with Intel tools, you are welcome to join the fray!

Members of Intel teams working on said tools monitor the forum, so if you have a particularly tricky question, now you can ask directly at the source. If you are unhappy with how some of Intel tools work, want something to be added or changed (for better… or for worse), this is a great channel to share your thoughts.

The new forum is a part of Intel Software Network, so if you have an account there, you can start to participate right now. If not, now you have another good excuse to finally create one (which is free).

The last thing left to say is the address of this latest and greatest forum: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-software-development-tools-for-itanium-architecture/

See you there!

I had the pleasure to speak with some  leading press and analysts who cover the high end server and solutions business during our recent Alliance press tour.  We had full schedule of visits starting on the West Coast and then moving east to New York and Boston. The quality of these conversations was excellent. On the Itanium side, we wanted to share the very positive 2008 data from IDC and Gartner that highlighted Itanium’s impressive growth in both revenue and shipments on a global basis coupled with market share gains against both IBM Power and Sun SPARC. We discussed the areas where Itanium is seeing great traction including Mission-Critical Data (such as Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence),  Data Center  Modernization (including IT consolidation and  moving selected workloads off legacy mainframes), and Computationally Intensive applications.

We talked about the Alliance’s use of social networking sites and techniques to reach the broader Itanium community and provided an update on our Innovation Awards program. Followers of the Alliance including press and analysts were able to track our progress on Twitter and hear interesting insights from our meetings as we moved cross country.  Hot topics included the use of social networking for business benefit, thoughts on the future of the “new” Oracle, and what opportunities cloud computing might provide for Itanium as it evolves.

In addition to building valuable relationships, the tour also resulted in some interesting coverage from Internet News and ServerWatch.  Additional coverage was generated from our press release in a number of on-line industry publications.

I would like to express my thanks to everyone who took the time to meet with us for candidly sharing their insights and I look forward to continuing  discussions in the future.