Dela via

Itanium computing receives a $10 billion infusion

  • Artikel

The Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) on Thursday last week announced a "$10 Billion Collective Investment Intended to Drive Itanium to Predominant Position within over $28 Billion per Annum Mission Critical Computing Market Segment!" Itanium clearly targeting the mission critical market segment has had a rough time from it's early days. Sales never really picked up (I know a lot disagree here and will stop reading) but the platform is definitively meant to compete in the high end and mission critical space.

This investment - provided my ISA members - will certainly help with system shipment but not necessary with sales. Since most ISA members are hardware companies I guess the biggest amount of the $10b will go into hardware sponsoring. The announcement states: The investment is comprised of planned funding of research and development, capital expenditures, sales and marketing, and ISV enabling activities."

BTW, Microsoft is also member of ISA. Don't know about any bucks we put into this program ...

Still unclear about my Itanium fan status. V.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2006
    Hardware sponsoring will only do so much until there is more support from Software vendors (regarding applications rather then devices) with native applications that run in the environment.

    The current support from Vendors for the 64 bit platform is pretty poor - with Microsoft being part of that group. Even Visual Studio doesn't have a native x64 version, nor does the SQL WB (SQL Management Studio).

    Maybe Microsoft should have a similar initiative to promote the x64 platform. How about something like a free, 3 month, MSDN Universal account. If after 3 months, you register a 64 bit application, you get another 3 months, and so on.
  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2006
    Dasher,
    of course, sponsoring HW does not really get us anywhere unless apps are available to run on this HW. Most of the sponsoring I have seen is still going into ISVs. Intel, hp and others sponsor systems for development to increase the number of apps.
    On the other hand, Itanium is not meant for any type of application or scenario. Microsoft made a clear commitment to support Itanium in future server versions of Windows. As you might know, Microsoft also announced a change in supported scenarios. Not only no more Windows workstation but also only a limited set of roles will be supported. Looking at our current internal and external customer base and how they use Windows on Itanium, it made sense to streamline the support for Itanium in a way that we can guarantee even more reliability and better scalability on our Itanium OS.
    References:
    http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/apr05/04-11Itanium.mspx
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/64bit/bulletin.mspx#EDAA