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.

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.