The Itanium Solutions Blog

On behalf of Intel Asia Pacific (APAC), I’d like to congratulate Dhairyasheel & the CMC team for being selected as a finalist in the Mission-Critical Category of the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) Innovation Awards.

As the former chairman of ISA in APAC, I hope that we will see a winner in these awards again this year from the APAC region and CMC is certainly in with a chance.

Regardless of the outcome, being selected as a finalist is a good recognition for CMC’s capabilities as an innovator on the Itanium platform especially with the quality of submissions for this award this year.

Our congratulations once again and good luck with the results next week.

Congratulations to Kiwok Nordic AB, the winner for the Humanitarian Impact category and all the finalists for this year’s Innovation Awards announced last week. Having gone through the list of submissions, I must say that the quality of submissions was really high… and innovative which is what the awards are about. Since 2 of the 3 winners from last year were from the APAC region, this year I need to give due credit and congratulate the impressive number of finalists from Europe this year…. all 8 of them!

Among the other finalists, Revenue Management Solutions from Tampa, Florida is particularly interesting to me. Their solution clearly solves a business problem for end users and fully utilizes the Itanium’s server capability.

While they didn’t become finalists, APAC submitters SK Telecom from South Korea and CMC Limited from India highlighted mission-critical solutions producing impressive results in their various fields.

Regardless of who wins the other awards when they are announced in September, the real winner is undoubtedly “innovation” which is clearly alive and well on the Itanium platform. All this bodes well for the future.

I have often been asked to define what I consider to be “mission-critical” since it can mean different things to different people. My Intel colleague in Europe, Joachim Aertebjerg, posed a similar question in a recent post. Is it a system with five 9s reliability or seven 9s? For some users, five 9s is good enough while for others seven 9s is still not good enough. (Seven 9s, by the way, is approximately just over 3 seconds downtime per year).
 
What I usually tell customers is to consider this - a manufacturing company ships out 10 PCs, 30 printers and 1 server from its manufacturing facilities every minute. So what is the cost of every minute of downtime? What about 10 minutes of downtime? I’ll let you do the math. Some may argue that such small interruptions are fine as they can work overtime to catch up; but what if it is the end of quarter where quarter close revenues will be impacted? Or if the shipment is destined for a very important customer where future orders depended on this shipment reaching its destination on time?
 
A more obvious example would be systems used in a stock exchange or other financial services institutions. The cost of downtime here could run into billions of dollars not to mention other implications like loss of reputation, etc. I’ll have more to say about this soon.
 
For customers that need this level of mission-critical, Itanium-based systems can deliver.

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!

To kick off my first posting here, I wanted to introduce myself and let the readers know that I’ll be blogging the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regional perspective as it pertains to Itanium. By the way, just to level set – by APAC, I am referring to all of Asia-Pacific including PRC but not Japan. I am the Regional Platform Marketing Manager at Intel based in Singapore.

Firstly, I want to talk about Itanium’s (continued) growth in the APAC marketplace in relation to how it is doing worldwide. You would’ve seen an earlier blog post last month about this and here are the APAC numbers based on IDC’s APAC Server Tracker for Q4 2008.

Itanium system revenue has been growing steadily since 2004 and annual system revenue grew 40% year-on-year from 2007 to 2008. By comparison, the competing RISC architectures like IBM POWER and Sun SPARC grew only 4% and declined 19% respectively. At the worldwide level, Itanium systems grew 18% while IBM POWER declined 22% and Sun SPARC declined 10%. So clearly, Itanium is growing faster than the rest of the competing RISC architectures and growing at a faster rate in APAC than worldwide.

Another data point from this report is that Itanium annual system revenue for 2008 versus IBM POWER grew 35% to 64%, and versus Sun SPARC it grew 74% to 117%. Itanium systems are now “out-shipping” Sun SPARC in APAC. (At the worldwide level, Itanium versus IBM POWER is at 64% while versus Sun SPARC, it is at 91%).

Based on the data, clearly Itanium system revenue is growing faster than both IBM POWER and Sun SPARC with the APAC market leading this growth.