The Itanium Solutions Blog

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.

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.

As rumors swirl in the marketplace regarding a possible merger of IBM and Sun Microsystems – a merger that would create a behemoth of proprietary architectures in a market increasingly looking for open standards-based solutions – one can’t help but ponder some very basic questions. Specifically:

• - What is IBM going to do with two proprietary microprocessor architectures? Not only is it extremely cost-prohibitive to continue support for separate R&D and manufacturing operations for two different architectures that serve basically the same markets, but it also creates confusion, uncertainly, and doubt with customers.
• - How long would IBM really continue to support two proprietary chip architectures? Two competing UNIX operating systems? Two competing blade systems? Two storage portfolios? Two competing services organizations? The list goes on and on. It’s hard to see the synergy or any economies of scale. If I were a Sun customer today, I would be feeling more than a little uneasy.
• - “Don’t get burned” has been IBM’s messaging about Sun and Sun’s technology for years. In the long term, what value does the IBM portfolio offer Sun customers? What value do IBM customers gain from what Sun brings to the table? Does the ability to include Java in its software portfolio make it all worthwhile?

The cost of swallowing Sun’s underwhelming portfolio – of which they have been critical for years – will be high. From my perspective, IBM seems bent on furthering its proprietary agenda and eliminating options for customers seeking a “best value” model.

Whatever the case, this questionable acquisition offers an excellent opportunity for mission-critical computing customers to evaluate their alternatives. What has been an ongoing battle between Power, SPARC, and Itanium is now essentially a two horse race. IDC data mapping Itanium-based server revenue to SPARC-based and Power-based revenue has shown Itanium rapidly gaining on both architectures and exceeding the revenue of one or both in key global markets. Given the issues that IBM will have to deal with to swallow Sun, I believe Itanium-based servers will continue to grow share.

Customers now have an even clearer choice for their mission-critical platform requirements; one that offers a robust architecture roadmap, an open standards-based platform, solutions available from leading computer manufacturers worldwide, a choice of ten Operating Systems, and an ecosystem of nearly 14,000 applications.

Itanium is continuing to show its strength in the marketplace versus the mission-critical platform competition.  IDC’s latest update of the Worldwide Server Tracker, covering the 4th quarter of 2008, shows that Itanium is continuing to take market share from key competitors.

For 2008, Itanium worldwide system revenue exceeded $5 billion, and for the seventh consecutive quarter in a row, Itanium worldwide system revenue exceeded $1 billion, the IDC report stated. Itanium worldwide system revenue for the year versus IBM POWER jumped 25%, from 51% of POWER system revenue in 2007 to 64% of POWER system revenue in 2008. Versus Sun SPARC, Itanium worldwide system revenue soared 34%, from 68% to 91% of SPARC’s system revenue on a year-to-year basis.

Itanium systems shipped increased 18% year-to-year, while POWER systems declined 22% year-to-year and SPARC systems fell 10% year-to-year, IDC reported. While it’s impossible to predict the future, the most recent industry results indicate a thriving Itanium platform that continues to show impressive strength and continued growth, especially versus proprietary RISC architectures.

Intel is enthusiastic about and fully committed to Itanium. We have a strong and healthy roadmap and pipeline of Itanium products in development. Tukwila, the quad-core Itanium processor-based platform, is on track for release later this year and two follow-on products, Poulson and Kittson, are under development. Intel is fully committed to meeting the needs of customers who have the most mission critical computing requirements, as they continue to migrate from proprietary mainframe and RISC-based solutions to open, industry-standard solutions running on Intel Itanium-based platforms.

Yesterday Unisys talked with a CNET blogger about their newest Xeon-based server and in the process, took aim at Itanium-based systems and our community of server vendors. Disputes about performance are one thing – and ignore larger discussions about reliability that any mission-critical application needs to consider – but suggesting a lack of vendor support around Itanium-based servers is a whole other matter. While it is certainly in any server vendor’s interest to use whatever means available to promote a strong price-performance story, especially in light of the challenging economic environment that’s wreaking havoc from banking centers to data centers, to imply that Itanium is lacking industry support or is a “one horse race” doesn’t reflect today’s reality.

The Itanium ecosystem continues to show remarkable strength in the marketplace. Itanium-based systems continue to gain share in both system revenues and system volume against its RISC-based competition. In the third quarter of 2008, Itanium-based system revenue nearly equaled that of Sun SPARC’s worldwide system revenue at 99% — the highest level since Itanium-based systems began shipping. Similarly, Itanium-based system revenue in Q3 2008 achieved the highest level versus IBM Power’s system revenue level for the third quarter of 2008: 71% (Source: IDC Q308 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, December 2008).

At the Alliance we count as sponsors the seven leading global Itanium OEMs, charter members including Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat and Oracle as well as more than 200 leading application providers. To date there are nearly 14,000 available applications and over 224,000 systems have shipped globally. We continue to see great strength for Itanium in a variety of market segments including mission critical applications, Itanium servers as a foundational platform for IT consolidation and data center modernization, and for computationally intensive environments, and we look forward to a lot of good news from the Itanium community in the coming months. (So stay tuned!)