Itanium Platform Boasts More Than 10,000 Applications

Published: October 5, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

To say that the Itanium platform hasn't gotten a lot of respect except in perhaps the past year is an understatement. To help counter the talking points that those who don't peddle Itanium-based processors use to constantly bash the Itanium platform, the companies behind the Itanium created the Itanium Solutions Alliance, which hosted its first summit meeting last week.

So far, 100 companies have joined the Itanium Solutions Alliance, which is a collective of companies that came together in September 2005 to demonstrate their commitment to the platform and to their ongoing investments in Itanium hardware and software development and to promote the use of Itanium-based products in data centers around the world. The alliance also announced that over 10,000 applications have been ported to various operating systems on the Itanium processor, which represents a 50 percent increase in the application portfolio in the past year. The Itanium chip, which was created by Intel with a lot of help from Hewlett-Packard, and is supported in high-end servers from Fujitsu-Siemens, NEC, Silicon Graphics, Bull, and a number of other players.

The way things are trending, the Itanium chip should have around 12,000 to 13,000 applications by year end. (Of course, you have to take into account that the applications are counted individually by operating system, which helps bolster the numbers.) Notably, Oracle said at the summit last week that it is working with the alliance as part of its process to get its database, applications, and middleware software certified on the Itanium platform.

The collective Itanium platform is generating a little less than half of the revenue stream that IBM's Power and Sun Microsystems Sparc platforms do in any given quarter. But it is growing at close to 40 percent annually, a much higher growth rate than the Power and Sparc platforms. The Itanium Solutions Alliance members said last year that as of September 2005, over 70,000 Itanium-based servers were sold worldwide, generating about $3 billion in sales.

This spring, the Itanium Solutions Alliance members said they would spend $10 billion in their individual Itanium research and development projects between the beginning of 2006 and the end of 2010. That averages out to $2 billion a year. Considering that IBM spends about $1 billion a year on its venerable mainframes, this seems to be a pretty hefty investment in Itanium development.

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