HP and Oracle, in collaboration with Intel Corp., 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, 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 Madrid-based 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 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 www.hp.com/go/ami.