BURLINGAME, Calif., June 30, 1999 — Some of the world’s leading companies from a wide range of industry sectors are announcing their move to Intel Corp. and Microsoft® Windows NT® operating system-based solutions at the Workstation Leadership Forum (WLF) ’99 this week. Companies such as BankBoston, Ellerbe Becket, Enron Corp., Lear Corp., Navistar International Corp., Sony Pictures Imageworks and Xerox Corp. are among the corporations highlighted at the second annual workstation event, hosted by Intel and Microsoft Corp.
Kicking off the two-day event attended by more than 700 users and developers, Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett and Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates will outline today the two companies’ commitment to leadership and innovation in the global workstation customer segment, emphasizing price/performance, application integration, tighter incorporation of workstations within the corporate enterprise, future IA64-based workstations and platform interoperability.
Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Business Group, and Jeff Raikes, Microsoft group vice president, Worldwide Sales and Customer Support, will keynote at WLF ’99 on Thursday morning, July 1. Otellini will demonstrate in his keynote how Intel Architecture-based workstations are meeting the performance needs of supercomputing environments and enabling new markets such as data visualization as a result of continued price/performance benefits of the platform. Raikes will discuss the future of high-end workstation computing, emphasizing Microsoft’s continued commitment to its customers, ongoing innovation to the Windows platform through significant research and development efforts, and further work with leading independent software vendors and original equipment manufacturers to ensure seamless application integration and platform interoperability.
“Both Microsoft and Intel have been very focused on delivering a solid workstation platform that provides all of the necessary ingredients – high performance, reliability, scalability, ease of use and low total cost of ownership – for customers to increase efficiency and reduce costs across their technical computing environments,”
Gates said.
“With a powerful set of tools and technologies, workstation users are empowered to become the ultimate knowledge workers, with a full spectrum of information at their fingertips and connected to the rest of the enterprise to share design knowledge.”
“Intel-based workstations are driving fundamental changes in the way people around the world design and create – everything from Internet content and movies to race cars, plane engines and sports stadiums,”
Barrett said.
“With the increased use of Intel Architecture-based workstations around the world and across diverse industries, the creation, analysis and design process is much quicker, more collaborative and less costly. Our work with Microsoft is key to continuing the rapid adoption of Intel Architecture-based and Windows NT-based workstations in the future.”
While last year’s Workstation Leadership Forum primarily highlighted the adoption of Intel and Windows NT by leading workstation hardware and software vendors for the development of native applications, this year’s focus has broadened to spotlight more dramatic workstation customer trends, including the following:
-
Rapid deployment in mission-critical and enterprise environments for increased performance and reliability at companies such as Enron Corp.
-
Utilization of key mechanical design automation (MDA), digital content creation (DCC) and financial services environments to create, view and share content at Sony and BankBoston
-
Growing use of workstations as a powerful engine for design collaboration and single-desktop integration at Xerox Corp. and architectural firm Ellerbe Becket
-
Accelerated growth of Intel and Windows NT-based workstation shipments in emerging markets such as Japan and the Asia Pacific region, 47 percent and 50 percent respectively in 1999 according to IDC
-
New workstation uses, such as data visualization and electronic trading
Over the past year, Intel and Microsoft have made significant strides in driving further performance improvements and easing the migration process to existing Pentium® III and Pentium III Xeon TM processor-based workstations running Windows NT-based solutions. The Pentium III processor and Pentium III Xeon processor families were announced in the first half of the year, which offer outstanding price/performance, flexibility and reliability on the Windows NT workstation platform.
“We conducted a pilot project to test the viability of moving to Intel Architecture and Windows NT for our high-end computing environment, and the performance of the platform, in some cases, exceeded that of our current UNIX system,”
said Korhan Sevenler, manager of engineering systems at Xerox.
“For this reason, as well as inherent benefits such as ease of use and low cost, we are very much in favor of the Intel Architecture and Windows NT platform. It is also very positive to see Intel and Microsoft so heavily committed to interoperability among various platforms and applications, so our transition can be gradual and as efficient as possible.”
About the Companies
Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom/.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
Microsoft and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ on Microsoft’s corporate information pages.
