According to Christanto Suryadarma, group manager of Internet Solutions Group, Itanium suffered from a lack of software to run on the chip. For its successor, Intel is advertising the wide selection of programs available over the technological advances.
-What's really holding back the user is the lack of applications, the lack of operating systems," Suryadarma told ZDNet Australia. -Hence our new advertising campaign."
The campaign is designed to convince the public that Intel products are ready to be used in the real world.
-There is a strong emphasis on the broad industry support," senior solution architect Ivan Chan told ZDNet Australia. -As we move to I2 we see not just support, but the applications are ready."
Intel claims to have 19 Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide shipping Itanium 2 servers, including main rivals in the high-end server market IBM and Hewlett Packard. It also sees another strength from the open-architecture, multi-vendor support model being the seven operating systems available.
Dr Kevin McIsaac, server infrastructure analyst for META Group, agreed with Intel's assessment of the marketplace.
-The 64-bit chips were very late to market, many of the vendors who had plans for them had changed those plans at that time, and it was clear that the second generation would be a big improvement" he told ZDNet Australia. -There was no reason to rush out a product based on Itanium when Itanium 2 was just around the corner."
-What will affect the success is the impending commoditisation of enterprise servers. It puts pressure on Sun and IBM because other vendors can put together a very competitive system which will be good enough, and we're past the stage where the servers have to be the best," McIsaac said.
