The Itanium Solutions Blog

Leading analyst firms Gartner and Forrester have modernization at top of mind. As Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and sponsor of the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA), I join over 100+ like minded companies and organizations in this vision. Members of the Mainframe Migration Alliance are part of a community you can partner with to determine your unique roadmap for the future. Each roadmap will be a combination of retirement, interop, replacement, rehosting and/or rewriting of applications. Like MMA member, the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I see this as a place where Itanium plays an important role. You might be interested to learn about Banco Azteca who decided to migrate its mainframe applications to a Windows Server®-based operating system running on Itanium servers.

“By freeing up money from software budgets, IT departments will be able to support more innovative projects across their organizations,” explains R “Ray” Wang, Forrester vice president, in The State of Enterprise Software: 2009.

From his April report Key Issues for IT Modernization, Dale Vecchio, Research VP at Gartner explains, “New developments in hardware platforms, data center infrastructure and operating systems are providing more enterprise-class technological solutions than ever before.”

What does your roadmap look like?

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.

With the economic problems around the world right now, you might wonder how that is affecting the IT industry — and the server market in particular. Would companies retrench and hold back on spending? The answer is that, with results counted from the first six months of an admittedly challenging 2008, the server business is apparently doing quite well. And Itanium fared well, too — with results that may suggest some of what is happening behind the scenes.

The results, which were summarized in a recent survey released by Gartner, Inc., include an interesting statistic: that worldwide server shipments in Q2 2008 were up 12.2 percent over the same quarter last year. Revenues were up as well, but by a smaller amount, 5.7%. This more-than-reasonable performance in a tough economic climate was driven by a combination of a “continued upswing in x86 server replacements” plus “Web center build outs” and growth in emerging markets.

That refers to the entire market, but how did Itanium fare in the same period? From one respect, raw shipments, not as well, with Gartner reporting that “RISC-Itanium Unix Servers” saw a 7.9 percent drop from the same quarter a year earlier. However, revenues for this server category were growing at a rate of 9.4%. As Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice-president of Gartner said, this indicated “that higher-end systems were the hardware platforms that drove sales in this space.”

One conclusion behind all this is that, even in a tough economy, IT executives continue to make the decision to upgrade their systems to increase productivity through performance improvements, higher availability and lower cost-of-ownership. Good tactics, under the circumstances.

The investment in higher-end Itanium systems at a considerably higher rate than in previous years suggests a more strategic move is also taking place as well. With major enhancements introduced for Itanium this year with emphasis on Virtualization, plus a number of developments that make Itanium-based server solutions more dynamically configurable on the fly, my guess is that you are also seeing an increased rate of server consolidation for companies that can afford to do so. All of which positions those companies even better when the overall economy begins its upswing, hopefully sometime in the near future.

Not a bad strategy, and the revenues are high enough to suggest that far more than just a few good companies are making this change. It is something for all IT organizations out there to consider as the economy continues to navigate the current doldrums and charts a course for a stronger recovery path ahead.

So stay tuned. My guess is that data for the third quarter will show even more of this trend.