Ten days after Dell announced it would end its use of Intel Itanium chips, a significant amount of top industry players today announced they have banded together to boost availability of Itanium solutions.
Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys form the enterprise and technical computing provider part of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. Software vendors BEA, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and SAS have also joined the organization as charter members; accompanied by early members Hyperion, Informatica, MiT Systems, MSC.Software, Sybase, Symantec, TIBCO and Trend Micro.
“There’s a very significant broad base of applications that are currently shipping and available on that architecture from each of the respective Itanium system vendors,” said Mike Mitsch, director of alliances for NEC. “We feel that there is critical mass in the marketplace.”
Indeed, the group claims more than 70,000 data center deployments of Itanium systems within the last four years and is backed by IDC estimates that Itanium server shipments will grow by more than a 65 percent compound annual growth rate with the market share revenue rising by 10 percent from 2002 to 2009 to nearly $6.6 billion.
“The formation of the alliance allows the acceleration of those applications at a faster pace than having each of the multiple companies pursue that development effort on their own,” Mitsch said. “The sum is greater than the individuals.”
One large individual company missing from the group is Dell Inc., which on September 16 confirmed it plans to phase out the use of Itanium chips.
“This [Itanium] market sector and the positioning of the product and the enterprise nature of the product is not a target for Dell. In many ways it is not surprising that Dell has decided to step away from this marketplace; they’ve done that in the past with endeavors in this market,” said Mitsch.
Article continues below“We hate to say that it’s not their sweet spot, but it really is not. They are not a technology-based company in that area. They are really focused in the commodity nature of the marketplace, and Itanium is not a commodity, cost-based play,” he concluded.
The Alliance aims to advance accessibility of Itanium solutions through delivery of a suite of enabling programs targeted at enterprise and technical computing developers. Programs announced at launch include Developer Days, workshops that will target Linux and Windows software developers; the Itanium Solutions Center Network, comprised of 20 global facilities hosted by Alliance member companies; and the Itanium Solutions Catalog, expected to feature all software that is supported for Itanium platforms and to be released by year-end.
The Itanium Solutions Alliance is unveiling its programs at three industry events this week: today at the High Performance on Wall Street event in New York, at this week’s IDC European IT Forum in Paris, and later this week at Intel’s server conference in Osaka.
|
