Senior executives from the Itanium industry met last week in San Francisco and announced a collective investment of US$10 billion to drive industry standard Itanium platform adoption in favour of legacy, proprietary alternatives.

Global vendors including Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys were involved in the collective investment to take advantage of the growing momentum in enterprise and technical computing environments for Itanium solution deployments in mission critical environments.

“Itanium solution delivery to mission critical environments represent a new business model for enterprise and technical computing users bringing choice of hardware platform, operating system and applications to environments which heretofore have been limited by proprietary vertical solution stacks,” said Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager of research group IDC. “A change this substantial takes collective industry commitment and investment.”

The investment is comprised of planned funding of research and development, capital expenditures, sales and marketing, and ISV enabling activities. 

The announcement came at the Itanium Solutions Alliance’s first Executive League meeting. Members discussed collective opportunities within the Itanium arena and opportunities to collaborate through Alliance programs.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance was founded in September 2005 with a mission to accelerate Itanium solution deployments. The Alliance offers a suite of developer enabling programs, a solutions centre network and the recently launched Itanium Solutions Catalog, the first public listing of software applications available on Itanium platforms.