GV, none of the Itanium products are going to be high volume without a base of software. It really is that simple. When you see the infrastructure, you should also see a pick up in Itanium 2 sales.
From what I understand, several very important things will be released for Itanium architecture in the next 6 months. The first is a number of operating systems, which include Windows .NET Advanced Server 2003 and Redhat Linux Advanced Server 2.1. These are both absolutely essential for any end user to take Itanium seriously. The second are database applications, which includes SQL Server, Oracle 9i, and IBM DB2 8.1. These represent the target segment in which Itanium 2 will first be positioned.
In the absence of these, Itanium 2 has been selling to a small niche of scientific and HPC communities, which are very small in volume. After the above software becomes available, however, Itanium 2's target audience should expand. If it does not, then it's time to blame Intel for failing to execute with the new architecture. |
