The Itanium Solutions Blog

Alliance president Joan Jacobs and I were honored to represent the Itanium Solutions Alliance at the recent Annual Summit of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). At the Awards dinner, the group honored the Alliance with its “Long-Established Alliance Award.”

The Association recognized the unique value that the Itanium Solutions Alliance has brought to the Itanium ecosystem since its founding. The Association also noted that the Alliance is unique in how competitors have come together in a collaborative environment to benefit customers who use Itanium-based solutions.

The Alliance beat out companies like IBM and EMC is this year’s program, and previous winners in the Long-Established Alliance award category include The Walt Disney Company and Coca-Cola. The Alliance is in good company indeed!

Read more about the Alliance’s award winning work in the press release.

Congratulations to all Itanium Solutions Alliance Sponsors, Charter Members, and Members! You all played a part in making this award a reality.

The Itanium architecture is known as a solid platform for data center consolidation projects and also for being a trusted foundation for mission-critical ERP applications. Two recent articles from Express Computer in India describe how two companies migrated their data center from x86 to Itanium-based systems.

Chambal Fertilisers and Chemicals Limited, (CFCL)’s IT landscape consisted of disparate IT systems with standalone x86 servers running discrete homegrown applications spread across regional offices to manage its in-house financial and transactional systems. These standalone x86 servers, running at various utilization rates, had performance issues whenever the production demand was high. CFCL’s manufacturing plant servers ran commercial and other core applications alongside niche applications on x86 servers, making it difficult to consolidate data. “It was a case of too many servers, too many applications, and too much customization—leading to increased spending on maintenance,” said V S Rao, Manager–IT, CFCL. CFCL decided to mitigate unexpected risks through the installation of HP Integrity servers fitted with dual-core Intel Itanium processors and running HP-UX 11i v2 to ensure high availability and simpler management. Read the entire article here.

Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Limited (Café Coffee Day) is a fully integrated coffee company that manages growing, harvesting, roasting, blending, exporting and retailing of coffee. To manage its growing, multi-faceted and geographically dispersed business, the company realized it needed an integrated solution to handle production and supply chain management. This new ERP environment would be critical to the smooth running of its business, and the company placed great emphasis on selecting the best platform to run its SAP software to ensure the highest possible levels of protection for its ERP environment. Café Coffee Day uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Priority Support for SAP Applications. The company also worked with PSI Data System to handle the migration from the original Intel Xeon-based platform to an Itanium-based platform. Read the entire article here.

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.