Itanium Alliance Joins Mainframe Migration Alliance

Published: July 25, 2007

by Alex Woodie

The Itanium Solutions Alliance, a group of hardware, systems software, and application software vendors that formed to back the development of applications for Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor, has joined Microsoft's Mainframe Migration Alliance, the group announced this week.

While the word "synergy" has undoubtedly been overused by the tech world over the past decade, it's an adept description of the coming together of the Itanium Solutions Alliance and the Mainframe Migration Alliance. Backers of the X86-X64 Wintel-Lintel architecture would argue that its "standards-based" computers are perfectly capable of hosting the types of "mission-critical" (there's another of those words) applications that mainframes are known to run. But some mainframe users may find the Itanium architecture better suited to their demanding workloads, especially if they're going to have to port their highly specialized applications off IBM's proprietary mainframe processors anyway.

In any event, the Itanium backers have now hitched their 64-bit wagons to the same train leading customers away from mainframe-land. While they may have different final destinations, they will follow a similar path as they seek to escape the mainframe's mighty grip, according to Robin Drummond, president of the Itanium group. "The Itanium Solutions Alliance participation in the MMA provides a great opportunity for two like-minded organizations to provide a wealth of knowledge for IT departments facing modernization of their IBM-based mainframe systems."

According to Microsoft, which joined the Itanium Solutions Alliance soon after its inception in 2005, the two groups have collaborated on numerous projects through the years. In fact, out of the 12,000 applications available for Itanium 2-based systems, more than 3,000 of them run on Windows, Microsoft says.

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