From correspondents in Karnataka, India, 09:20 AM IST

Itanium® Solutions Alliance, a global community formed in collaboration with the world’s leading IT companies unveiled its roadmap for 2008 at a special media round table today for the Indian media. The alliance also shared winners of its second annual innovation awards and its intention to expand partnerships and solutions presence in India. This year’s category winners are S7 Software for Entrepreneurial Innovation, Protégé Software for Enterprise Business Application achievement; and Gencom Inc. for Humanitarian Impact.

“The stories of this year’s winners amply demonstrates the impact of Intel® Itanium® technology in solving mission-critical computing challenges in a wide range of application environments. The breadth of entries was impressive and selecting a winner in each category was quite challenging. The winners’ and finalists’ solutions clearly showcase the value of an Itanium®-based solution over costlier mainframes in real-life applications,” said Joan Jacobs, executive director, Itanium® Solutions Alliance.

S7 Software Solutions a software services and product-based company specializing in software migration and re-engineering domain, was recognized for porting more than 2 million lines of software code of a Fortune 100 company’s financial transaction processing system. Faster response time, higher availability and flexible scalability made the Itanium®-based platform the perfect fit for their migration challenge. “By migrating our customer’s application engine onto the Intel® Itanium® architecture, we helped our customer derive the benefits of Itanium’s scalability and performance features including faster transaction time, secure around-the-clock processing and extensive software environment,” said Phaniraj Raghavendra, software architect, S7 Software Solutions.

Enterprise Business Application category winner Protégésoft developed Financial Portfolio Builder (FPB), a comprehensive financial investment system that runs on four-way HP Integrity servers based on Intel® Itanium® processors, and supports the entire spectrum of portfolio management on a single unified platform. FPB helps rebalance thousands of client accounts in a matter of minutes, optimizing risk and return exposure and providing greater customer service at lower cost and better performance. Investment banks have already achieved annualized portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than the conventional method.

Gencom’s Genesys, hosts the world’s fastest in-silico drug discovery systems, produces the cleanest copy of the Human Genome in existence and provides the most comprehensive collection of biological and chemical data available needed for drug discovery research. A leader in drug discovery optimization, Genecom is advancing the current state of high performance computing for institutions engaged in functional genomics and other computationally intensive drug discovery activities.

The alliance has forged a partnership with Microsoft and reached an agreement with Sophos (www.sophos.com), a world leader in IT security and control, for a Q4 2008 release of Sophos Anti-Virus for Linux on Itanium-based systems for Red Hat EL 4.x and Red Hat EL 5.x besides showcasing technology preview of Sun Microsystems Java 6.0 on Itanium-based servers.

ISA recognizes innovation in Itanium® architecture with the annual Itanium® Solutions Alliance Innovation Award. The global award program recognizes innovation and achievement using Intel® Itanium® processor technology to solve complex entrepreneurial, business and humanitarian challenges. Each project is judged on the level of difficulty, originality and the results produced; while the winner receives a cash price of $50,000 U.S.

Source: Press Release Distribution via India PRwire