Two of the three Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards for 2008 were awarded to HP Developer & Solution Partner Program (DSPP) Member companies. Protégésoft won the award for Enterprise Business Application achievement and S7 Software Solutions was recognised for Entrepreneurial Innovation. A third award went to the University of Houston's bioinformatics research team for Humanitarian Impact. The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards program recognises innovation and achievement using Intel® Itanium® processor technology to solve complex humanitarian, business and entrepreneurial challenges.
The Enterprise Business Application category awards the creative use of applications that use the benefits of the Intel Itanium architecture to produce either hard business results (such as cost savings and ROI) or soft business impact (including customer satisfaction and new product development). Winner Protégésoft replaced outdated and cumbersome legacy systems with HP Integrity to take advantage of features in their new Financial Portfolio Builder (FPB). FPB is a comprehensive financial investment system that runs on four-way HP Integrity servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. FPB supports the entire spectrum of portfolio management. It includes account setup and maintenance, investment allocation, monitoring and dynamic rebalancing, reporting and more -- all on a single unified platform. Using this tool, clients of investment banks achieved annualised portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than the conventional method.
Protégésoft has been an HP DSPP partner in the Asia/Pacific and Japan region for 4 years. "Our 'love affair' with HP started when were referred by another DSPP partner to develop a compute intensive application which current industry standard servers were unable to solve," said Kumaran Pillai, CEO of Protégésoft. "As a start up, we were fortunate to have such a good R&D partner to provide us with high-end servers, benchmark/ testing platforms and marketing support," said Pillai.
Protégésoft has now established presence in India and Malaysia and been working closely with the HP teams in Singapore and STSD in India. The company has been a HP Asia Pacific Japan Elite ISV for the past 2 years where the companies collaborate on regional sales and marketing activities. In his congratulatory message, Freddy Tan, Vice President and General Manager, Commercial Accounts, Solution Partners and Alliances, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific Japan, said "We are very happy to see our Elite ISV partner, Protégésoft, winning the innovation contest by selecting HP Integrity Servers on Itanium®-based platforms as their preferred developmental platform. We have been supporting Protégésoft in its development, sales and marketing efforts in the Asia Pacific region. We are proud to be able to support Protégésoft's efforts to harness the scalability, robustness, and efficiency of HP Integrity servers to achieve the quantum leap in performance of their application to in the financial services industry."
The winner of Entrepreneurial Innovation category, S7 Software Solutions, was recognised for their unique work porting more than 2 million lines of software code onto the Intel Itanium architecture for a Fortune 100 company's transaction system, which supported financial institution processing, mortgage loan processing and other service products. Faster response time, higher availability and flexible scalability made the Itanium-based platform the perfect fit for their migration challenge. The company's solution ran on HP-UX 11i and Linux RHEL 4 on a Dual Core Intel Itanium processor. Through the India DSPP alliance team, the partner has been involved with the Integrity Porting workshops and also participated in the certification program for their Integrity migration services.
In testimony to the strength of the Itanium and the partnership, Kumar Rangarajan, Director of Engineering, S7 Software Solutions, said "We have selected to work with HP because of their platform's superior strength and capability and the support they provide to their customers and partners. We have been providing our porting and migration services to many multinational companies across the globe, especially in the US, India and Western Europe. This win demonstrates S7's capability in harnessing the core value of the existing legacy code and adapting it to the latest technology innovations offered by the new architectures, such as Itanium, ensuring the capabilities of the new architecture/technology is fully exploited."
"With our in depth knowledge of HPUX and various platforms from other vendors, we are well positioned to provide services to HP and their customers by providing our migration expertise to HP-UX," Mr. Kumar added. The company is in the Porting and Migration business, and they have worked on a lot of cross-platform migration (UNIX to Linux, other UNIX to HP-UX, Solaris, SCO, AIX and SGI, etc), support and maintenance.
"These wins demonstrate the strength of the Integrity platform and the importance of our continued support and commitment to partners in the region," said Freddy Tan, Vice President and General Manager, Commercial Accounts, Solution Partners and Alliances, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific Japan. "It also demonstrates the continued commitment of regional partners to innovation and we are happy to work with them in their endeavour to provide better business outcomes for our customers."