IBM Nabs Former HP Itanium Customer
Scoring a major win against competitor Hewlett Packard, IBM on Thursday announced that it had struck a deal with the China State Tax Administration to replace its HP Itanium servers with IBM Power5-based UNIX systems. But HP is disputing the significance of the announcement.
According to IBM, the Chinese government was one of HP's largest customers for Intel's Itanium processor line.
In 2003, then HP CEO Carly Fiorina celebrated the China deal as the first in what was to be several expected wins for the Itanium platform. However, those victories never materialized, and the company stopped co-developing the chip with Intel in December 2004.
"HP's investment in Itanium has never looked more misguided," an IBM spoksperson mused. "The IBM win is unprecedented in size, scope and impact on a competitor." However, HP does not agree with that assessment.
"What they are claiming as a 'landmark win' with the China State Tax Administration to replace HP Itanium systems is nothing of the sort. Prior to last year, the customer ran an almost exclusively IBM shop. Last year, they chose to buy 80 systems from HP, including 46 Superdomes (largest Superdome order ever). All of these systems are PA-RISC based -- NOT Itanium," Rich
Marcello, general manager of HP's Business Critical Systems, told BetaNews.
"Though IBM did win another account with China State Tax, it was not a replacement of HP systems. The China State Tax Administration will continue to use a significant number of HP systems," Marcello added. "IBM's 'news' is nothing to crow about -- it's all part of the normal ebb/flow of the server business."
Still, Itanium lags far behind Power-based UNIX servers in terms of market share. In August 2005, IBM had a 32.9 percent share of the market, while Itanium-based servers comprised 6.9 percent of the market.
The Chinese government will use the IBM eServer p5 595 and the IBM eServer p5 570. These servers are slated to become the backbone of the Third-Phase Golden Tax Project, an effort to modernize and standardize the country's taxation system. The implementation of the initiative should be completed in about four to five years.
The announcement of the China deal comes just days after the Top500 survey revealed that 219 of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers were IBM-based. The number of Itanium-based servers decreased 50 percent since the last survey.