The Business Drivers Met by Itanium Processor Development

Intel CEO Craig Barrett sums up the most immediate benefit that companies will see from implementing the Intel Itanium architecture in their businesses by pointing to the need to process immense chunks of data. As he puts it, “None of us can escape it because the business models—the customer bases—increasingly drive us to analyze more and more information.”

This ability to handle bigger databases with tremendous speed allows businesses to mine or analyze more and more data in a cost effective fashion. Arguably, the most urgent business management issue for large companies is how to really handle the huge databases that make up their product list, customer base, and order history. It's the Itanium-based systems that can take and process this vast amount of data and analyze it efficiently.

Businesses are also seeing their customer base increasingly going international. If one uses Intel or HP as a proxy, then about 70% of business now is done outside of the United States. Barrett notes that any company that follows a similar track of success will not be able to avoid dealing with customers around the world. Therefore, it will be forced to look at marketplaces around the world on a real time basis.

If the trend is for successful companies to go global, then it only means more customers, more complexity in the business, faster product introductions, and streamlined supply chain models. In turn, this will require more data, more instantaneous access to the data, faster analysis of the data, and faster response to the supply chain.