BANGALORE, INDIA: Itanium Solutions Alliance unveiled its roadmap for 2008 at a press brief. The alliance briefed upon its expansion partnerships in India for the year 2008 and also announced the winners of its second annual innovation awards.

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.

This year's category winners are S7 Software for Entrepreneurial Innovation, Protégé Software for Enterprise Business Application achievement; and University of Houston for Humanitarian Impact.

Eddie Toh, chairman, ISA APAC, said, " The winners' and finalists' solutions clearly showcase the value of an Itanium-based solution over costlier mainframes in real-life application. Moreover, we are the only company that has a roadmap specifying its plan for the ninth generation."

"ISA has plans to work with leadingenterprise ISVs to develop more powerful business solutions on Itanium for Business intelligence and ERP. It would focus on virtualisation and security and help IT professionals mitigate and improve operations by providing cost-effective and efficient business solutions. It also focussing on mainframe migration for Linux and Windows. ISA will deliver tools to address today's issues and enhance environment using Java and .Net ans is all set to unviel Tukwila, the next generation platform," he added.

S7 won the award for its unique work of porting more than 2 million lines of software code on to the Intel Itanium architecture for a fortune 100 company's transaction system.

"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.

"It is an age of open systems and people are moving over to this system from mainframe systems," said Anant Sharma, country business manager, HP India Sales Pvt Ltd..

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.

Humanitarian Impact winner University of Houston researchers Drs. Yuriy Fofanov and  Lennart Johnsson and team developed an application using high-performance computing and the latest advances in genomic sequencing to identify and monitor microbial genetic diversity. Itanium-based systems power the computational tools the team needs to advance their research into global warming, human activities and toxic waste in efforts to protect humanity, other organisms and combat greenhouse gases that are harmful to the environment.