INDUSTRY

NEC Solutions (America) today announced an aggressive sales strategy program to demonstrate NEC's commitment to Intel's Itanium-based solutions architecture. NEC's competitive sales program includes a strategic discount on its current Itanium offerings, from its scale up Enterprise Class Express5800/1000 series. "NEC's Itanium server solutions offer enterprise and technical computing customers outstanding price-performance and advanced platform capabilities for mission critical and technical computing environments," said Larry Sheffield, executive vice president for Solutions Platform Group of NEC Solutions America. "Based on the recent TPC-H 1,000GB benchmark scores conducted on our 32-way and 16-way NEC Express5800/1320Xe servers, we are confident our Itanium 2-based server platforms provide high performance on 64-bit server solutions, and to further underscore our commitment to the Itanium architecture, we are driven to extend this compelling sales opportunity nationwide." With three world-class High Performance Computing (HPC) application technology centers, its deep heritage in supercomputer and mainframe technology and NEC's expansive research and development efforts in Itanium server technology, NEC's commitment to the Itanium market is unparalleled. Additionally, NEC has delivered over four-generations of Itanium processors supporting enterprise class systems, and was recently awarded Best in Category for "Research and Technology" for its technology demonstration of its 64-bit Montecito solution at the Intel Developer Forum -- America's (IDFA) in San Francisco, CA, on August 24. NEC recognizes the demand for Itanium solutions are moving toward the high-end symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) sever market, where performance and scalability are vital. By focusing on high-end SMP servers with original cell architecture, NEC is expecting significant market growth; where Itanium continues to gain mind share and become a mainstream processor for enterprise servers. Itanium Offer from NEC Effective today through December 31, 2005 NEC will offer a large discount on base configurations for its NEC Express5800/1000 Itanium 2-based servers. The Express5800/1000 ships with a 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor, 4MB cache with 8GB memory is now available for $53,000. Included in this promotion are also incremental price reductions for systems scaling up to 32-processor systems. Additionally, NEC will offer an optional upgrade maintenance program guarantying upgrades for future Itanium CPU architectures. For more information regarding this targeted promotion, please call (888) 820-5354. For more information on NEC Itanium server products, go to: its Web site.