HP, Intel and Oracle gang up against mainframes

By Tom Sanders on Oct 25, 2006 8:42 AM
Filed under Hardware

Itanium-Oracle bundels to court enterprises to move off expensive mainframe.

HP, Intel and Oracle have unveiled a new Application Modernisation Initiative that aims to help move enterprises off mainframe systems.

In a keynote presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, HP chief executive Mark Hurd.

"More than 65 of IT budgets are spent on keeping [mainframes] running," Hurd charged.

He touted HP's Itanium systems as a cheaper alternative to mainframe systems, most of which are made by IBM. But he also conceded that mainframe systems power many mission critical applications for enterprises and that migrating those to a different architecture is expensive and complicated.

The initiative will offer to move legacy mainframe application to modern architectures such as the upcoming service oriented architectures as well as application modernization services from HP.

The group also has developed a pre-configured and pre-tested reference architecture based on an Itanium power HP server running Oracle's database.

The new offering is available as of today.

Oracle at the same event highlighted a new partnership with IBM to push its databases on IBM's System Z mainframe systems. The two vendors will more closely collaborate on sales and marketing, and customers will be offered up to US$250,000 in incentives.