Itanium Solutions Alliance Selects Sweden’s Kiwok as the 2009 Innovation Awards Winner for Humanitarian Impact

The Alliance also names honorable mentions for Humanitarian Impact and finalists in all other award categories

PORTLAND, Ore., July 27 /PRNewswire/ -- The Itanium® Solutions Alliance today announced Kiwok Nordic AB as the winner in the Humanitarian Impact category of its 2009 Itanium Innovation Awards. Judges selected Kiwok for its BodyKom Series remote ECG monitor. Deployed in conjunction with caregivers and health systems, BodyKom allows heart patients to live independently while their heart is monitored through a reliable wireless network powered by Itanium-based hardware. The Kiwok system provides automatic, real-time notifications as well as furnishing long-term data for diagnosis and treatment.

Finalists have also been chosen in the awards program's three other categories: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, and Computationally Intensive Applications. Winners will be announced at the 2009 Innovation Awards Celebration on September 23 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"We are delighted to have received so many worthy entries to our Innovations Awards program this year and would like to thank all the companies from across the world who submitted their Itanium-based projects," said Joan Jacobs, president and executive director of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. "With so many outstanding deployments to choose from, the judges had the difficult task of selecting the Humanitarian Impact winner and category finalists. The organizations recognized this year are to be congratulated for their innovative work, and for demonstrating the power of Itanium-based platforms to tackle intricate business problems and drive singular solutions to global challenges."

"As a spokesman for the whole Kiwok team, I am most honored to receive this prestigious award," said Bjorn Soderberg, sales and marketing director, Kiwok. "But it wouldn't have been possible to create this solution without our core partners, the Karolinska University Hospital, HP, Fair Isaac and Wireless Independent Provider. This award we also see as the start for our international launch, with the goal to have the BodyKom solution up and running in new markets within the coming 12 months."

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards recognizes and rewards end users and developers for outstanding use of Intel® Itanium-based servers in their organizations or applications. Panels of distinguished judges evaluated submissions from 14 countries spanning five continents based on a number of criteria, such as difficulty of challenge, results produced, and originality, and their scores were tabulated to select the finalists and winners in each category.

Humanitarian Impact

The Humanitarian Impact category awards the innovative use of Itanium-based systems to deliver results that benefit humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts. The winner in this category receives a $50,000 cash award to support their important work.

Humanitarian Impact winner Kiwok's BodyKom collects ECG data from patients whose heart conditions do not require hospitalization, yet require periodic or frequent monitoring. Utilizing an HP Integrity NonStop server to ensure the heart monitoring information is reliable, secure and highly available at all times, the BodyKom technology saves significant resources by freeing up hospital beds and providing immediate feedback on the effects of ongoing treatments.

The following entries were category finalists and earned honorable mentions for their Humanitarian Impact:

• XDelta Limited's "Pulse Renewal" project created a disaster-tolerant system for the National Health Service Blood & Transplant organization that manages the entire supply chain of blood products from donation, through testing and blood product production, to the safe and timely issue of blood products across England and North Wales. The system implements disaster-tolerant OpenVMS clusters using Itanium-based HP Integrity Servers and contains the world's largest single national database of blood donors.
• Purvis Systems, contractor to the Fire Department of New York City (FDNY), ported the FDNY's City-wide Management Information and Control System to an HP Itanium rx3600 running OpenVMS V8.3. The system powers dispatch to all five boroughs, supporting the 11,275 uniformed fire personnel in 221 firehouses with approximately 500 vehicles. The system processed approximately 475,000 incidents in 2008 including 26,862 structural fires, with significantly improved incident response times over the previous system.
• Karlsruhe University's United Airways project in Germany used Itanium-based HP hardware to analyze the interaction of the human nose, sinuses, larynx and lungs with the goal of compiling a complete numerical simulation of flow behavior in the human respiratory system. The end benefits of this project include optimizing asthma sprays, improving the quality of medical operations and understanding the impact of respirable dust.

Finalists - Computationally Intensive Applications

• CESGA, the Supercomputing Center of Galicia, Spain, is using the Finis Terrae Supercomputer to analyze massive computational electromagnetics problems, the largest with more than 500 million unknowns, for improvement of design in industry. CESGA relied on Itanium-based HP Integrity servers with 1,024 parallel processors and 6TB of memory in attaining the first-of-its-kind solution.
• University of Warwick in the United Kingdom greatly improved the computational approach to the Anderson model of localization, an important problem in quantum physics with a wide range of applications. Researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland and the Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany were also involved in these large-scale numerical experiments performed on an SGIO Altix® with 56 Intel IA-64 Itanium processors, each with 3 MB level 3 cache.
• Revenue Management Solutions maintains one of the largest MicrosoftÒ SQLÒ Server databases in the world with more than 100 billion records, requiring a system that is secure, reliable, scalable and powerful enough to keep up with massive growth. The company's current system configuration utilizes an 8-socket Itanium-based system from NEC.
• HOPS International used HP Integrity servers with Itanium processors to develop its web-based business intelligence product called HOPS Reveal. The product supports multi-dimensional financial information for organizations with data sets containing upwards of tens of billions of rows of detail transactions. HOPS Reveal is provided in a Software As a Service (SaaS) model and must scale to support millions of licensed users.

Finalists - Data Center Modernization

• Bernalillo County, located in central New Mexico, upgraded its server and storage infrastructure in order to operate more efficiently and provide additional services to county residents. The county's Itanium-rich HP solution improves the reliability of applications, increases performance across multiple platforms, consolidates servers and allows for expedited new server deployment.
• Clerity Solutions' UniKix mainframe rehosting software suite provides a mission-critical environment for deploying online and batch mainframe workloads on open systems. By adding support for Itanium-based-systems in UniKix 11.0, Clerity can offer direct and independent software vendor customers greater choice and extremely high reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) levels on open systems.
• ENAGAS, the company responsible for Spain's gas management, consolidated its legacy Unix infrastructure into two Itanium-based HP Superdomes to streamline operations. The project reduced racks from 12 to four, dramatically lowered application response times and improved the time needed to provision a new test/development environment from several days to less than an hour.
• The Brazilian Navy migrated all mainframe-based database environments-including three large, complex, mission-critical systems: payroll, HR, and accounting systems-to an open, Linux-based system and adopted an HP and OracleÒ-based distributed platform with Itanium processors. The project reduced costs by approximately 80 percent while significantly improving resource management.

Finalists - Mission-Critical Data

• Parallels modernizes and consolidates MicrosoftÒ SQLÒ Server deployments in the enterprise through consolidation using Itanium-based HP Integrity servers and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, offering substantial savings in operational expense.
• Masaryk University in the Czech Republic deployed a massive online information system that integrates 1,600 applications actively used by more than 43,000 students, teachers and other staff into a uniform Web environment. SGI Altix servers running on Itanium processors host tools utilized for online enrollment, e-learning modules, as well as applications allowing students to make payments for services.
• Online Resources powers financial technology services for financial institutions, billers and credit service providers, offering online banking services, card and credit services, and e-commerce gateways. To improve the performance, availability and scalability of its services, Online Resources turned to Itanium-based NEC servers and a MicrosoftÒ SQLÒ Server database.
• Mobiltel, Bulgaria's leading telecommunications provider, faced significant subscriber growth, which seriously impacted the performance of its customer relationship management (CRM) and billing applications. Mobiltel migrated its infrastructure to an Itanium-based HP Integrity platform, running both HP-UX and Microsoft Windows Server, with significant gains in performance and customer service.

About the Itanium Solutions Alliance

The Itanium® Solutions Alliance is a global community of hardware, operating system and application vendors dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium®-based solutions. Formed in September 2005, the Alliance comprises some of the most influential companies in the computing industry with a shared, strategic commitment to delivering mission-critical computing solutions based on the Intel® Itanium® architecture. http://www.itaniumsolutions.org

© 2009. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

CONTACT: Joan Jacobs of Itanium Solutions Alliance, +1-508-835-6504, jjacobs224@att.net; or James McIntyre of McClenahan Bruer Communications, +1-503-546-1016, james@mcbru.com, for Itanium Solutions Alliance