Itanium to help push all HP server lines

“Itanium will help push HP sales in all of our server lines,” that was the parting comment from Peter Hall, Marketing Manager of Unix systems Business Customer Organisation Asia Pacific.

When spoken to at CommunicAsia 2001, he was there to demonstrate Itanium’s capabilities with partner-developed software and HP’s own e-services suite that is part of their ‘Always-on, Always-available’ vision for the future.

But, isn’t there customer reservations about Itanium and how some were waiting for the release of McKinley before making a purchase decision? He replied by saying that such people did not fully understand the situation.

Itanium is the first in a new series of 64-bit chips to be released from Intel. McKinley will be the second. Itanium, as it relates to HP, is a new architecture that Hall says is perfect as a bridge for those currently sitting on the fence as by the time McKinley is released, most of the customers hardware and applications should already be on the Itanium architecture. It should help propel the sales of the OpenView Management suite as well as increase the popularity of HP’s e-services as both are actively promoted during Itanium sales.

Given that sales of Itanium only recently started, Hall said that HP is very pleased in the levels of interest and sales generated thus far. Without going into specific figures, he was able to reveal that sales so far have met all expectations and that all pre-orders have been fully filled.

According to Hall, support for Itanium has been widespread from HP’s partners as well, with many of them modifying existing or even creating new application suites to run on Itanium to fully utilize its full potential.

Hall saw Itanium as THE next big thing to make an impact on servers. To succeed in the future, servers would need the ability to serve multiple O/Ss whether they be HP-UX, Linux or Microsoft.