The Itanium Solutions Blog

I read with interest Ashlee Vance’s recent article in the NY Times, where according to sources, Sun is canceling its Rock chip project after 5 years of development work at a cost estimated in the billions. For all those Sun customers who have been patiently waiting and delaying server purchases in anticipation of Rock, this has to be a huge disappointment. Jon Stokes of Ars Technica further speculates that if Rock has fallen by the wayside, in the long run can SPARC be far behind? In any case we will all be following the latest developments from Oracle as they move forward to absorb Sun. In the meantime I encourage IT decision makers looking for a “rock solid” mission-critical computing platform to visit the Alliance site, check out the Itanium platform and hear from customers the positive impact Itanium-based solutions are having on their businesses.

As the dust settles around what could possibly be Oracle’s most interesting acquisition to date, lots of questions remain. Most industry observers agree that the deal provides some great benefits to Oracle given the software “jewels” that Oracle will acquire including Java,  Solaris,  mySQL and others. As Larry Ellison said himself in the press release: “Java is the single most important software we’ve ever acquired.” Considering all the software Oracle has acquired over the years, that’s quite a statement.

What has been the subject of much speculation is what Oracle will do with the Sun hardware.  Based on a recent statement, Larry Ellison confirmed his commitment to Sun’s hardware business. At this juncture it’s really the only thing he could say without risking damage to a significant component of the acquisition. It will be interesting to see how well Oracle can play the server hardware game (with which it has no experience), how long it will play it, and how being in the server business will affect its on-going relationships with its other server platform provider customers/business partners.

Regardless of the outcome, I believe that the current state of affairs is certainly a positive development for Itanium. I imagine some long-term Sun customers are taking a long, hard look at their future computing direction. Uncertainty breeds opportunity.  Itanium has seen some significant marketshare gains against SPARC over the past several years and I expect this trend to continue. Information about migrating to the Itanium architecture can be found on the Alliance website.

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.