H-P: 50% EMEA Clients To Migrate To Itanium 2 By Mid-04
LONDON -(Dow Jones)- Hewlett-Packard Co . (HWP) Monday said it expects at least 50% of its workstation customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to migrate to its Itanium 2-based workstations by the middle of 2004.
The forecast followed H-P's global roll-out of servers, workstations and services built on Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM: INTC - News) 's 64-bit Itanium 2 chip for multiple operating systems. The chip is targeted at high-end users that require huge amounts of memory and large servers.
The roll-out is the latest step in the push to popularize the new Itanium chip architecture, a joint project between Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM: MSFT - News) and Intel.
In a media conference call, Juergen Schlanke, business unit manager for H-P workstations EMEA, said: "By the end of 2003 to the middle of 2004, I expect 50% of mainstream workstation customers to have migrated to Itanium 2 workstations. Although I refer to EMEA, there are not large differences in the expectations across geographies."
H-P has already signed up around 100 software partners in the region.
Thomas Ullrich, business marketing manager for H-P servers EMEA, said within 15 to 18 months, he expects "significant revenues" to arise from Itanium 2-based servers, and forecasts the majority of servers will be Itanium 2-based within two or three years.
Udo Schmitt, H-P services Itanium program manager EMEA, said although the timeframe is longer on the service side, he expects business from Itanium-based services to take off, once the commercial market for the systems opens up after companies such as Microsoft , Oracle Corp. and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP - News) build the Itanium 2-based systems into their products.
Schmitt said H-P's research indicates customers in the U.K., France and Germany are more aware of Itanium than their peers in North American - a situation he expects will help H-P's European marketing of its Itanium-based products.
Schmitt said the Itanium 2-based roll-out hopes to capture both the workstation-based technical market, where demand for chips is driven by the power demands of software, and the operating system-driven commercial market.
Ullrich said H-P's Itanium 2-based products provide customers with one hardware platform which can support three operating systems concurrently, while delivering increased performance at a lower cost than other 64-bit chip providers.
-By Nic Fildes, Dow Jones Newswires; 4-9264; nicolas.fildes@
dowjones.com |
