PORTLAND, Oregon, January 9 /PRNewswire/ --

- Global gains and major milestones mark successful 2008

The Itanium(R) Solutions Alliance marked a year of accomplishment as
Itanium-based systems saw increased migration from legacy mainframes and
earned continued success in the mission-critical and computationally
intensive arenas. The Alliance and the Itanium platform continue to gain
momentum as enterprise IT organizations upgrade infrastructure to take
advantage of increased performance and reduced cost of ownership and markets
take greater advantage of high-powered Itanium-based server technology.

Global shipments of Itanium-based systems have now exceeded 210,000
units, and sales continue to be strong with revenues passing US$1 billion USD
for the last five quarters. For instance, Itanium has made significant
advances in EMEA, seeing an overall market segment share increase of eight
percent at the end of Q3 2008 [source: Gartner Server Update Q308].

"The Alliance has more than 200 organizations united to promote open,
industry-standard solutions based on Intel(R) Itanium architecture," said
Joan Jacobs, president and executive director. "Itanium-based solutions
continue to grow in application support, system volume and market share,
thanks to considerable advantages for mission-critical databases, data center
modernization and computationally intensive applications."

Built to be an industry-standard open platform, Itanium technology enjoys
support from leading independent software vendors (ISVs) -- and operating
system vendors Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat -- who collaborate on new
solutions for end users. The availability of multiple technologies from the
open source community leverages the work of industry experts to enhance the
solution. The Alliance promotes a robust ecosystem for the Itanium
architecture that includes more than 13,000 applications for mission-critical
computing across multiple industries including financial services,
manufacturing and the biosciences.

The following 2008 milestones reflect the progress of the Alliance's
efforts and those of sponsor companies:

-- In April, Fujitsu Limited launched its new line of PRIMEQUEST servers,
built on dual-core Itanium 9100 series processors. These servers, built for
mission-critical applications, offer new features like dynamic partitioning,
helping them achieve impressive benchmark results. Fujitsu strengthened its
global partnership with fellow Alliance member Red Hat in November, when they
began a joint development of Linux support services designed to offer quicker
problem resolution and extended support periods for mission-critical
environments.

-- In early 2008, Alliance sponsor Hitachi made its Virtage embedded
firmware virtualization feature available for the first time on blade servers
based on the Intel Itanium 9100 series processors. Virtage brings embedded
firmware virtualization -- and with it, lower costs and increased
functionality -- to the enterprise data center. Virtage technology allows
users to scale and virtualize models of Hitachi's BladeSymphony 1000 servers
and makes embedded firmware virtualization available to all three tiers of
the data center -- edge, application and database.

-- HP introduced the high-availability, fault-tolerant HP Integrity
NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem featuring Itanium processors. This blade-based
system for mission-critical deployments delivers world-class availability and
scalability for Itanium. HP further expanded its portfolio with the HP
Integrity BL870c server blade, designed to handle memory-intensive data
center workloads while helping businesses lower cost, save energy and space,
and decrease deployment time. Reinforcing its leadership, HP also migrated
more than 250 companies worldwide from mainframe systems to HP Integrity
systems over the past two years, saving these customers up to 70 percent in
operational costs.

-- Released in October, Sun Java SE 6 Update 7 for Itanium culminates a
collaborative effort between Intel and Sun and provides a robust development
platform for Itanium-based solutions. Supporting both Windows and Linux, the
update offers improvements in Hotspot Virtual Machine and class libraries to
deliver significant performance gains over the last Java release for Itanium.

-- Super Micro Computer, Inc. entered the Alliance at the sponsor level,
joining current sponsors in committing time and resources to the
organization, contributing their unique perspective and considerable
expertise to the Alliance's efforts.

-- The Alliance recognized 2008 Innovation Awards winners S7 Software
Solutions, Protegesoft, and the University of Houston bioinformatics research
team at a special event in their honor in August in San Francisco at the
Museum of Modern Art.

-- Microsoft is working with Alliance members to further advance the
performance of the .NET framework on the Itanium architecture. This will
benefit ISVs who are using or considering .NET as a development environment
for solutions for Itanium-based platforms. In addition, HP and Intel joined
Microsoft and others at WinHEC 2008 to showcase the scalability benefits of
supporting more than 64 processors in a preview of Windows Server 2008 R2. In
a demonstration running 256 Itanium logical processors on an HP Superdome
system, Microsoft and HP spotlighted the joint potential of Windows and
Itanium for large SQL Server databases. As Bill Laing, corporate vice
president, Windows Server and Solutions Division of Microsoft, observed in
his keynote, "Itanium is supported in Windows Server 2008 R2 and we really
focused our support on Itanium for these large scale database workloads."

-- The Alliance and Sophos announced the porting of Sophos Anti-Virus to
Itanium. The offering represents some of the most powerful and extensive
anti-virus solutions for Itanium-based systems, delivering proven algorithms
to identify, quickly disable, and quarantine anti-virus threats.

This past year also marked highly successful implementations and
innovations based on Itanium architecture. Some examples are:

Fujitsu Dials in Upgrade for Brazil's Largest Mobile Telecommunication
Company

Faced with increasing demands on its Next Generation Intelligent Network
(NGIN), Vivo of Brazil chose Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST servers running on Intel
Itanium processors. NGIN is responsible for managing and authorizing prepaid
calls based on available credits, credit loading and interfacing with stores'
systems, resellers, call centers and client attendance.

NEC Awarded Contract for National Pension System by Taiwan's Bureau of
Labor Insurance

To integrate its new national pension system, the Taiwanese Bureau of
Labor Insurance turned to database solutions from NEC Corporation. The
project is a national-level large-scale mission-critical system that will
handle pension-related data for approximately five million employees. The new
system features more than 100 NEC servers, including the Itanium-based NEC
Express 5800 Series, and will process critical operations related to the
national pension system.

SGI Optimizes EventVUE for Itanium-based Altix Servers

SGI announced that its Complex Event Processing (CEP) solution has been
optimized for Itanium processors, which enable applications to take maximum
advantage of the high-throughput, shared-memory SGI Altix architecture. The
CEP platform combines SGI compute and visualization capabilities to help
government, defense and Homeland Security leaders make faster, more informed
decisions in complex situations where immediate action may be required.
EventVUE monitors key thresholds in real time to trigger data flow and
processing according to pre-determined policies, so decision makers are
alerted to potential threats immediately.

About the Itanium Solutions Alliance

The Itanium Solutions Alliance was formed by leading enterprise and
technical solutions providers to work together towards a common objective of
transitioning the world of proprietary computing platforms to open, industry
standard solutions based on Intel Itanium architecture. Together with leading
enterprise software and hardware providers, the Alliance is dedicated to
accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium-based solutions.
Its membership comprises some of the most influential companies in the
computing industry. More information about the Itanium Solutions Alliance,
membership, industry resources and developer programs can be found at
http://www.itaniumsolutions.org.

(C) 2009. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel
Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos
referenced herein belong to their respective companies.