Customers Select HP and Oracle to Modernize Legacy Environments
PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 13, 2007 - HP and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), in collaboration
with Intel Corp., today announced that their Application Modernization Initiative is
gaining momentum as customers increasingly migrate away from legacy systems to drive
business growth with more reliable and efficient IT infrastructures.
Introduced last year at Oracle OpenWorld 2006, the Application Modernization
Initiative is a comprehensive solution that helps businesses modernize their legacy
environments to increase business agility and performance, reduce operational costs and
lower risks.
The initiative is a multi-vendor collaboration that delivers specialized hardware, software and services that are designed to help companies easily transition from legacy
environments to an open-standards based infrastructure that is flexible enough to meet
dynamic business conditions.
The Application Modernization Initiative was most recently adopted by the Swedish Tax
Agency (Skatteverket), a government agency under the Ministry of Finance in Sweden. In
leveraging the tools and resources of the Application Modernization Initiative to
modernize its IT environment, the organization joins, among others, BBVA, a Madridbased
multinational financial services group, and Carrefour Italy, part of one of the
world's leading distribution companies and the world's second-largest retailer.
"Customers are rapidly adopting our solutions to assist in the modernization of their IT environments," said Joe Kovach, vice president, Consulting and Integration, HP Services. "The Application Modernization Initiative enables organizations to efficiently transition to open standards-based architectures so they can focus on innovation."
According to Dale Vecchio, research vice president, Gartner, "Gartner continues to see
a growing interest in modernizing the business processes implemented in legacy
applications. The desire to create greater agility is driving organizations to consider
more modern application platforms as the vehicle for satisfying that demand. The
relationship between the application decisions and the underlying infrastructure upon
which they are delivered is critical to any IT modernization initiative."
When the Swedish Tax Agency wanted to modernize its technology infrastructure to
make its operational activities more effective, it worked with HP Services to design and implement an application modernization solution. The agency's objective was to simplify its procedures when interacting with both the public and business community.
"We have selected HP to perform key migration of our Unisys legacy applications. This
migration will make it possible for the Swedish Tax Agency to provide better
opportunities for all kinds of taxpayers to file their tax returns electronically, and save time and money," says Anne Grön, chief information officer, Swedish Tax Agency. "This is a critical modernization program for the Swedish Tax Agency. Under the contract, HP will migrate the existing legacy mainframe environment, consisting of Cobol and Assembler applications, to a new, open systems-based environment including HP
Integrity servers and Oracle Database."
The Application Modernization Initiative solution incorporates the Oracle Grid
Computing Platform with SOA capabilities, including Oracle Database 10g with Real
Application Clusters, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager/Grid
Control.
The solution runs on HP Integrity systems based on Intel® Itanium® processors - working
with the HP Virtual Server Environment Reference Architecture and HP Software Business
Technology Optimization solutions that include SOA governance, quality and
management products - making it an ideal platform to achieve the required availability,
scalability and resource utilization.
It is designed, implemented and supported through the HP Application Modernization
Services portfolio and also includes architectural design and consulting support from HP, Intel and Oracle.
"The success of our joint investment in the Application Modernization Initiative
demonstrates the strength of our alliance. Together we are helping enterprises take
advantage of an open standards, SOA-based solution to give customers the confidence
to address these expensive and inflexible legacy systems," said John Gawkowski, vice
president, Platform Technology Solutions, Oracle. "We are delighted to have Oracle's
Grid Computing software playing such a key role in this initiative."
"Open systems based on Intel Itanium processors, such as the HP Integrity server line,
provide superior price/performance and dependability for mission-critical applications," said Diane Bryant, vice president, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel. "The Application Modernization Initiative from Intel, HP and Oracle is providing tangible benefits to customers through accelerated innovation, minimized risk and reduced costs."
Underscoring the open nature of the Application Modernization Initiative, HP, Intel and
Oracle also announced today the first two members of a network of independent
software vendors whose offerings complement the initiative.
Relativity Technologies, Inc. supports the initiative with its Modernization Workbench®
software platform. The platform maximizes the business value of existing operations by
analyzing, adapting and re-architecting legacy applications. Orsyp S.A. is providing its market-leading Dollar Universe job and batch scheduler software used by thousands of companies worldwide across a broad range of platforms.
More information on the Application Modernization Initiative product and service
offerings is available at http://www.hp.com/go/ami.
About Oracle
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more
information about Oracle, visit www.oracle.com.
About HP
HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers - from
individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing,
personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world's
largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $104.3 billion for the four fiscal quarters
ended Oct. 31, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at
www.hp.com.
More news from HP, including links to RSS feeds, is available at
www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/.
Editorial contacts:
Michael Thacker, HP
+1 650 857 2254
thacker@hp.com
Carol Sato, Oracle
+1 650 633 5551
carol.sato@oracle.com
HP Media Hotline
+1 866 266 7272
pr@hp.com
www.hp.com/go/newsroom
www.hp.com
