Itanium Backers Launch Alliance to Bolster the Chip

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you were one of the handful of server suppliers who have spent untold hundreds of millions of dollars developing Itanium-based server solutions, would you want Intel to do the marketing talking and roadmap walking for you? Or would you want to ride on the coattails of the defensive as well as offensive Itanium marketing tactics by Intel's number one Itanium partner, Hewlett-Packard? Would you want to have some kind of direct say in how the Itanium ecosystem is being cultivated?

The answers to these questions are "No," "Forget that," and "Absolutely!" (Well, they are actually "No," "Hell no," and "You're damned right!" But we can't say that in a family newsletter.)

And that is why the vendors behind the various Itanium platforms of the world have gotten together to create the Itanium Solutions Alliance, which is a loosely coupled organization of hardware, systems software, and application software vendors who will channel and focus their efforts to promote the further development of applications on the Itanium platform.

As HP has been talking about for a while, there are now over 5,000 applications available on the Itankumn platform, and according to Dominique Grelet, worldwide business manager for the NovaScale line at French server maker Bull, one of the major goals of the Itanium Solutions Alliance is to radically increase the number of independent software vendors and applications that get ported to the Itanium architecture. While 5,000 is a pretty big number, it really needs to be 10,000 or 15,000 for the Itanium architecture to be undeniably here for the long term--both Intel and HP keep saying it, over and over, but somehow, there is always this doubt lingering because of the success of the high-volume X64 processors.

Since shipping in production-quality machines in early 2001, there have been over 70,000 Itanium servers valued at just under $3 billion deployed around the world. While this is a fairly large number, we have to remember how Itanium was adopted in the late 1990s, before the first chip even saw the light of day, by IBM and Sun Microsystems just after HP jumped on the Itanium bandwagon (and I believe convinced Intel to move away from a chip design that would have looked more like an X86 and less like an Itanium, which looks a bit like a PA-RISC chip). I remember the charts showing how Itanium would have represented the bulk of server shipments by now, and an even bigger piece of the revenues. It seemed so inevitable, just because it was Intel.

When the IT market went south in 2000 and Itanium was two years late and the first generation "Merced" Itanium chips were a pretty big disappointment, Sun canceled its Solaris on Itanium plans, and even though IBM created (along with SCO) a version of its AIX 5.1 operating system for Itanium, it never shipped it because it caught the Linux bug. IBM sold Itanium servers for a while, but said it would not support Itanium chips in its X3 "Hurricane" chipset a few months ago and was concentrating on creating 64-bit Xeon designs. And a few weeks ago, Dell said it would stop selling Itanium servers, which was actually a non-story since Dell never did sell very many Itanium servers and it certainly did not do very much engineering on the Itanium boxes it did sell. For their own reasons, Sun, IBM, and Dell don't want Itanium to succeed. They have other platforms they want to push, and this being a free market, they can do that.

But as these three vendors have left the Itanium fold, other server makers who are influential in their markets and niches have enthusiastically adopted the Itanium processor for their current and future server platforms. That would be Unisys, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens (yes, they tried to count it twice), NEC, Hitachi, and Silicon Graphics. (HP is also a member of the alliance, of course, as is Intel.)

For many of these vendors, the applications they very much want to get ported to their Itanium-based platforms are in specific languages for specific niches and they have to be approached in a coordinated manner so efforts are not duplicated and companies don't spend a lot of dough cultivated the applications. "The alliance is not only for big companies," explains Grelet. "We will see more regional and specific ISVs joining." Moreover, Itanium Solutions Alliance wants to give the smaller ISVs, who do not have as much pull with Intel, the server makers, the operating system providers in the alliance (that would be Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell) and the many ISVs who develop middleware and other systems software for Itanium boxes (such as database maker Oracle and application server provider BEA Systems, who also joined the alliance). So far, 67 vendors--including IBM--have been invited to join the alliance.

While the members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance will work together on cultivating Windows and Linux applications, Grelet says that in terms of other platforms--such as Bull's GCOS mainframe platform, NEC's related ACOS platform, and HP's NonStop, HP-UX, and OpenVMS platforms--vendors are on their own in cultivating applications. But for Windows and Linux application cultivation, the members of the alliance will pool resources such as development centers and techies and work together to identify and cultivate solutions on the Itanium platform.

One of the main things the alliance will do is host what are called Developer Days, which are hands-on labs to help ISVs do their Itanium ports--in Santa Clara, California in November, in Tokyo, Japan in December, and in Paderborn, Germany in February to start. These will be classroom/lab settings where there is a ratio of seven ISV programmers for each Itanium expert, and they will be available for free to ISVs. You don't have to join the alliance to do this. The alliance has also brought together 19 different development labs, which are now called the Itanium Solutions Center Network, which provides test drive systems (both in the centers and remotely, and this is free) for ISVs and a member lab program (yes, you have to join for this) to help ISVs do their ports. The goal of the alliance is to have 50 ISVs pump out a couple of Itanium applications each in the next six months. Grelet says many more applications than this will be ported through the Developer Days. Finally, the alliance will be putting together an official solutions catalog that shows exactly what software is available on the Itanium platform. While Intel and HP have put up Web sites that list Itanium applications, these are often not up to date and they often do not agree on what ports are ready. This undermines the credibility of the application counts that Intel, HP, and others tout as they promote the Itanium platform.

The question now is: Can the Itanium community keep rolling out new application ports at the same rate? Jason Waxman, director of marketing for Intel's Server Platform Group, is hopeful but not making any commitments. HP says that the 5,000 application ports figure was reached ahead of schedule--and double from 12 months ago--but that doesn't mean the trend line can continue. "I think we will see the growth rate in the application base slow down a little," says Waxman. "It will take longer than a year to double again." But, he added that just like this year, "we might be pleasantly surprised."