The Itanium Solutions Alliance today announced the winners of its second annual Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award. The global award program recognizes innovation and achievement using Intel Itanium processor technology to solve complex humanitarian, business and entrepreneurial challenges. Each winner receives a $50,000 U.S. cash prize or can make a charitable donation to an organization of their choice. This year’s category winners are University of Houston bioinformatics research team for Humanitarian Impact; Protégésoft for Enterprise Business Application achievement; and S7 Software for Entrepreneurial Innovation. “The Itanium Solutions Alliance congratulates our three winners. Their stories clearly demonstrate the impact of Intel Itanium technology on solving mission-critical computing challenges in a wide range of application environments. The breadth of entries was impressive and selecting a single winner in each category was extremely challenging. The winners’ and finalists’ solutions clearly showcase the value of an Itanium-based solution over costlier mainframes in real-life applications,” said Joan Jacobs, executive director, Itanium Solutions Alliance. 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. The university powered their solution using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP rx5670 and rx8620 and SGI Altix 3700 servers. “The high performance computing power of Intel Itanium processors makes it possible for scientists to better navigate the microbial landscape, which is essential in our research as we analyze critical genetic information,” said Dr. Fofanov, director, Bioinformatics Laboratory, University of Houston. “Itanium-based systems provide the memory bandwidth we need to store special data structures required to manipulate genomic information In addition, Itanium’s high availability launches us toward initiating new research projects that will advance human progress in environmental protection, public health and safety, sustainable energy and many other research areas.” Enterprise Business Application category winner Protégésoft replaced its outdated and cumbersome legacy system for its clients with Intel Itanium architecture to take advantage of availability features on their Itanium-based system. 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 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. FPB supports the entire spectrum of portfolio management from account setup, account maintenance, investment allocation, monitoring and dynamic rebalancing, reporting and more, all running on a single unified platform. For financial institutions, 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. By using this tool, clients of investment banks achieved annualized portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than the conventional method. “The Itanium chip and platform helped tremendously to provide the required processing power with an exceptional degree of reliability and robustness," said Kumaran Pillai, CEO, Protégésoft. “Itanium’s flexible and scalable architecture increased ROI, allowing investment banks to process thousands of client accounts in minutes.” S7 Software Solutions won the Entrepreneurial Innovation award for their unique work porting more than 2 million lines of software code onto the Intel Itanium architecture. The process was 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. “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. Eleven industry experts made up the judging panel for this year’s Innovation Award program. Judges reviewed Award applications based on level of difficulty, results produced and originality. Entrants applied to one of the three categories and were asked to demonstrate one of the following criteria:

• Humanitarian Impact applications needed to show an impact on humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts;
• Enterprise Business Application entries were asked to prove either hard business results, such as cost savings and ROI or soft business impact, including customer satisfaction and new product development; or
• Entrepreneurial Innovation category, open to privately held entities with annual revenues less than $25 million in the previous fiscal year, sought to recognize enhanced business results through deployment of Itanium-based systems achievements in areas such as IT consolidation, increased ROI, increased customer satisfaction and new product development.

For more information about the Innovation Award or the winning organizations, visit its Web site.