PALO ALTO -- HP today announced the winners of the 2012 Mission-Critical Innovation Awards, a worldwide competition recognizing organizations that utilize HP and Intel technologies to execute leading-edge mission-critical solutions to address their data-intensive, large-scale applications.

Link to the press release - HP Website

Tata Consulting Services, FIS-ASP, Gravic, Istituto G. Caporale and Kenya Women Finance Trust Deposit Taking Microfinance were honored for addressing mission-critical computing challenges while attaining new levels of availability, scalability and reliability for complex workloads.

"As mission-critical clients face increased workload demands, they need technologies that seamlessly deliver greater performance and agility," said Lorraine Bartlett, vice president, Worldwide Marketing and Strategy, Business Critical Systems, HP. "These industry-leading firms have successfully deployed solutions with combined technologies from HP and Intel to support massive workloads that enable these organizations to thrive."

An independent panel of judges from leading nonprofit and professional organizations, as well as research institutions including CERN openlab, Enderle Group, Pyalla Technologies and Secure64 Software reviewed the submissions. Criteria considered by the judges included difficulty of the IT challenge, originality of the solution and results achieved.

"These nominations exemplify the level of success that organizations are achieving with HP solutions on both Intel Xeon processor and Itanium processor systems," said Lisa Graf, vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Connected Systems Group Marketing, Intel. "The winners demonstrate what is possible when organizations are determined to drive their mission-critical computing forward with Intel-based HP Solutions."

Enterprises and governments submitted entries in the categories of Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, Best New Application and Humanitarian/Environmental Impact. This year's winners include:

• Mission-Critical Data: Tata Consulting Services (TCS)—India-based provider of IT services, business solutions and outsourcing, improved collaboration among their 240,000 global employees by enhancing scalability, performance and stability for new social networking platforms using HP Integrity servers running Intel® Itanium® 9300-series processors and HP-UX. TCS also used HP ProLiant BL460c servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and virtualized with VMware for additional support of database applications. The new infrastructure offers high availability features and a reliable failover solution for TCS, while also providing the company with a scalable solution that is less complex than competitive offerings.
• Data Center Modernization: FIS-ASP—German SAP outsourcing firm leveraged HP CloudSystem Matrix with Cloud Service Automation on HP Integrity, as well as HP Integrity blade servers with Intel Itanium processors and HP-UX 11i v3 with HP 3PAR Storage, to automate installations for SAP customers in one day,⁽¹⁾ which previously took a month. The shortened installation timeframe allows FIS-ASP to now address new markets with smaller SAP installations.
• Best New Application: Gravic Inc.—American provider of data collection, transformation and distribution solutions, used HP Integrity NonStop NS1200 servers running Gravic Shadowbase® software to establish a fault-tolerant architecture for a banking customer located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which experiences frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity. With an active/active data replication solution in place, critical banking applications remain active and reachable even in the event of natural disasters. Gravic's HP and Intel based infrastructure allows the bank to avoid application downtime, both for planned and unplanned outages, as well as dramatically improves failover time.
• Humanitarian/Environmental Impact: Istituto Giuseppe Caporale (ICT)—The Italian National Public Health Service, a public health institution, provides scientific and technical support to national and regional governments in animal health and welfare, veterinary public health, and food safety. ICT deployed HP Superdome 2 with HP-UX 11i v3 to analyze more than 1 billion records annually and expand research for effective control and prevention of disease. The agency also deployed the datonix.it web application on HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures with HP Integrity BL860c i2 server blades, and its data repository runs on an HP 6400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) networked with an HP 8/80 SAN switch. ICT's updated infrastructure saw decreased processing time for complex data, from 12 hours to one, allowing for faster reporting of animal disease studies to the Ministry of Health. With a new simplified administration, ICT is saving up to 10 man-hours per month, allowing resources to be redirected to strategic projects to enhance public health services.
• Humanitarian/Environmental Impact: Kenya Women Finance Trust Deposit Taking Microfinance Limited (KWFT DTM)—Serving 600,000 clients, of which 80 percent are located in remote rural areas of Kenya, KWFT DTM selected HP Superdome 2 and HP Integrity BL890c i2 servers to create a highly available data center and reduce business processing time from 12 hours to under four hours. KWFT DTM also increased uptime from 82 percent to 99 percent,⁽¹⁾ speeding the loan process to organizations that promote the use of clean energy, including solar lanterns for domestic and commercial purposes, electricity, and the purchase of gas cylinders and use of bio gas. The upgraded infrastructure allows KWFT DTM to concentrate more on growing the business by reducing time spent on fixing system errors and cutting costs incurred in power and maintenance functions.

Additional information about the Mission-Critical Innovation Awards, including details about all of the 2012 finalists, is available at www.hp.com/go/mcia.

HP's premier Europe, Middle East and Africa client event, HP Discover, takes place Dec. 4-6 in Frankfurt, Germany.

⁽¹⁾ Based on internal client data.

Intel and Itanium are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

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