Itanium® Solutions Alliance in collaboration with the world's leading IT companies unveiled its roadmap for 2008 at a special media round table for the Indian media. The alliance also shared winners of its second annual innovation awards and its intention to expand partnerships and solutions presence in India. This year's category winners are S7 Software for Entrepreneurial Innovation, Protégé Software for Enterprise Business Application achievement; University of Houston for Humanitarian Impact.

S7 Software Solutions, a software services and product-based company specializing in software migration and re-engineering domain, was recognized for porting more than 2 million lines of software code of a Fortune 100 company's financial transaction processing system. Faster response time, higher availability and flexible scalability made the Itanium®-based platform the perfect fit for their migration challenge. 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. FPB helps 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. Investment banks have already achieved annualized portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than the conventional method.

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.