For what i'm aware of, as any proprietary system, the risk is to control its market or disappear. I believe PSI+HP+Intel+MS tried to make the mainframe market disappear and be converted to Intel tech and i'm not sure this is a good thing in terms of technology options and diversity.

And HP has also it's own proprietary technology on Itanium and PA-RISC processors.

"IBM should be congratulated for finding a way out of this very, very difficult situation by simply buying the only thing resembling a challenge to its mainframe monopoly"

errrrrr no actually.... http://www.hercules-390.org/

(ducks to avoid the IBM black helicopters; IBM does NOT like Hercules!)

Not too long ago, IBM was the second largest IBM server shipper. And this was with a company policy of not informing the customer of their Itanium range, not advertising it, and deliberately pushing Power and Xeon instead, yet they still found 4000+ instances where the only system that could do the job was an Itanium server. Maybe PSI and Itanium will give them an option to make their mainframe business a more attractive proposition, otherwise I don't think it will be long before another emulator vendor decides to have a go.

Give us a substantiated example of the "4000+ instances" where only an Itantic would save the world then Matt? Sounds like a made up number. I ask because it triggered me to perform a brief search of your other contributions, and the result came back "Fanboi/Shill".

Itanium was an attempt to displace other chip architectures from the UNIX space. It failed.

The Itanium servers that IBM sold were part of the xSeries portfolio so there was no insentive for the sales team to sell Power boxes. In fact with the massive extra cost over the Xeon products everyone was really trying to sell them as an easy way of making their targets. A lot of design effort was put into making a scalable Itanium offering but no one wanted it. As it was more x380/x450/x455 servers went into demo centres and loan kit than actually got sold so I'm thinking that 4000+ is out by a couple of orders of magnitude.

PH - because she could count to 40 with a friend's fingers and toes to help