SAN FRANCISCO – Some of the biggest names in computing have committed a collective $10 billion toward standardizing the Itanium platform.

Senior executives from a number of top firms who met yesterday in San Francisco to map out a strategy for Itanium say they are targeting the mission-critical computing market.

The announcement came at the Itanium Solutions Alliance’s first Executive League meeting. Representatives came from Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys.

Itanium platform revenue currently makes up 58% of Sun's SPARC and 33% of IBM's Power2. Over 6,000 applications are said to be running the architecture.

In a statement IDC group vice president and general manager Vernon Turner said, “Itanium solution delivery to mission critical environments represent a new business model for enterprise and technical computing users bringing choice of hardware platform, operating system, and applications to environments which heretofore have been limited by proprietary vertical solution stacks. A change this substantial takes collective industry commitment and investment.”

The investment is comprised of planned funding of research and development, capital expenditures, sales and marketing, and ISV enabling activities. 

Itanium application support has doubled within the past 12 months, the Alliance said in a press release.

The Alliance was founded last September, bringing together companies seeking to accelerate Itanium solution deployments.