A Santa Clara-based technology company today is hailing three IT groups - one dealing in software services, another in financial investments and a third in high-performance computing - for using its own "Intel (News - Alert) Itanium" architecture in their work.

The so-called "Itanium Solutions Alliance" was formed to transform the world of proprietary computing platforms to open, industry-standard solutions based on Intel Itanium architecture.

Intel officials unveiled three "winners" of annual awards at a meeting in India, where the company said it hopes to do more business. Joan Jacobs, the alliance's executive director, said the list of winners "demonstrates the impact of Intel Itanium technology in solving mission-critical computing challenges in a wide range of application environments."

"The breadth of entries was impressive and selecting a winner in each category was quite challenging," Jacobs said. "The winners' and finalists' solutions clearly showcase the value of an Itanium-based solution over costlier mainframes in real-life applications."

The companies she referred to are: S7 Software for "Entrepreneurial Innovation," Protégé Software for "Enterprise Business Application," and the University of Houston for "Humanitarian Impact."

The entrepreneurial award went to S7 for porting more than 2 million lines of software code of a Fortune 100 company's financial transaction processing system, according to Intel.

S7's software architect, Phaniraj Raghavendra, said the Intel platform worked because it offers fast response time and flexible scalability.

"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," Raghavendra said.

Intel recognized Protégésoft for developing what it calls the "Financial Portfolio Builder," a system that runs on four-way HP Integrity servers based on Intel Itanium processors.

According to Intel, the system can rebalance thousands of client accounts in a matter of minutes, optimizing risk and return exposure and providing greater customer service at lower cost and better performance. Intel officials say that investment banks see annualized portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than other methods.

Finally, University of Houston researchers Dr. Yuriy Fofanov and Dr. Lennart Johnsson received recognition for advancing the field of genomic sequencing to identify and monitor microbial genetic diversity. According to Intel, Itanium-based systems powered the computational tools the team used in their research into global warming, human activities and toxic waste.