HP has been rallying the SAP flag to the Itanium cause, saying that in the past 180 days, HP and software giant SAP AG had together shipped over 180 customers running the mySAP application suite on the Itanium platform.
HP says that when it comes to supporting SAP, which runs on Windows, Unix, and Linux, the advantage of being able to run all of these platforms alone or in concert on the Itanium-based Integrity server line is appealing to SAP shops.
What neither HP nor SAP have said is how many high-end SAP customers have opted for other platforms, so this statistic just hangs out there in space. What we do know is that in HP’s latest quarter, the company said that Integrity servers accounted for about 16% of the $1.03 billion in sales at its business critical servers unit, up from a 5% share of sales this time last year.
HP’s Enterprise Server and Storage division had $4.1 billion in sales in the third quarter of fiscal 2004, so Itanium servers sales of about $161 million amounted to about 4% of that division’s sales. While this growth is good, it is not a very big number, and while software ecosystems take time to build, Itanium is not doing as well in the market as many had hoped, despite its technical merits.
