Investment Protection
The triple protection that Itanium architecture offers is for legacy software, legacy hardware, and legacy data. This was the second major goal we had when we began the project. We wanted to protect the customer's investment in IT infrastructure as much as possible.
Legacy Software
It turns out that when you analyze an organization's IT investment, the bulk of it is not in the hardware. Most of the investment beyond the people is in the software and the legacy data that is stored. So one of the goals when developing Itanium was being able to run—even though it would be at a lower speed than a native binary—the existing applications coming from both the IA-32 world as well as the PA-RISC world.
HP built this investment protection ...
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