The Itanium Solutions Blog

IT professionals face untold challenges every day. Competitors increase pressure with new products and services. Budgets are squeezed. Business leaders demand dynamic applications to meet new objectives. Meeting conflicting demands requires new approaches, one of which is moving applications and data from older legacy systems to open architecture-based solutions.

The Alliance is pleased to offer a new white paper, Seven Tactics to Lower the Risk and Optimize the ROI of Data Center Modernization (PDF), which defines how to facilitate the process. The white paper walks through the steps of planning, preparing, and executing data center modernization. We hope you will find it a useful resource in today’s challenging business environment.

Click here for additional information on Data Center Modernization.

Now that all entries to the 2009 Itanium Innovation Award program have been submitted, I want to thank all of you who shared your innovative and compelling Itanium-based solutions with the Alliance. We received entries from 14 countries on five continents, again demonstrating the global success of the Itanium platform.

Check back with us on July 14 when we will announce the winner in the Humanitarian Impact category and the three finalists in each of the other three categories. And of course we hope that you will join us for the Awards ceremony during Fall IDF in San Francisco!

I’d like to take a moment to congratulate Itanium Solutions Alliance member Secure64 for winning a 2009 Best of FOSE Award.  For those not familiar with FOSE, it is the premier showcase for the latest technology products for the U.S. government which is, by the way, the largest purchaser of IT products.

Government Computer News awarded 14 technology companies with GCN Best of FOSE Awards for 2009.  The awards recognize outstanding and innovative information technology products for government exhibited this week during the 2009 FOSE expo in Washington.

Secure64 won in the Security Software category for DNS Signer which runs on the company’s SourceT operating system for the Itanium platform.  Be sure to check out this award wining product.

Recognition of Secure64’s excellence in the security marketplace isn’t new.  The company was a winner of the Itanium Solution Alliance’s 2007 Innovation Award.  Look for more innovative solutions on the Itanium platform in the Alliance’s 2009 Innovation Award Program.

This week Joan Jacobs and I have been attending the 2009 Summit of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP).   This is a fascinating group of individuals who manage a wide variety of alliance programs and relationships.  There is strong membership from both the IT and Bio-Pharma industries along with individuals from education, finance, insurance, and manufacturing.  The group has local chapters in many areas including New England and Silicon Valley.  ASAP is working with a number of firms to create a group in Japan as well.  I recommend that anyone interested in Alliances look into the organization.  http://www.strategic-alliances.org/

As part of the Hi-Tech track on Tuesday afternoon, Joan and I presented on the Itanium Solutions Alliance.  Our slide deck is available on slideshare for those who are interested.  We got a lot of positive feedback.  Attendees were interested in how our Alliance brought together companies that usually compete with each other in order to achieve common goals.  Although our session was the last of the day, and the thing only standing between attendees and the cocktail reception, the audience of about 75 stuck with us through the end.  http://www.slideshare.net/amasland

Other sessions in the Hi-Tech track included speakers from HP, BT, CA, Microsoft, Telus, Cisco, software.com, and Flextronics.  While all had slightly different perspectives on Alliances, all supported the notion that companies can gain strategic advantage through well managed Alliance programs.  I couldn’t agree more.

As marketing chair of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I am pleased to say that our new blog is off to a great start.  Visiting the blog regularly is an easy way to stay up-to-date on news surrounding Itanium-based solutions and other items of interest to the Itanium community.  For example:

•    Linux Devices recently offered some independent reporting from an open-source perspective on the Alliance’s news of a successful 2008 and strong momentum for Itanium-based systems. http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7477895313.html.

•    Dr. Dobb’s Portal alerted its readers in the developer community to the news regarding the successful port of Java SE 6 for Itanium.  http://www.ddj.com/java/212901759.

In the near future, the Alliance blog will include important information regarding future releases of Itanium-based solutions, performance enhancements, and developer tips on a range of topics, including Sun Java on Itanium.  I hope you’ll check back on a regular basis; or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.