One American high-tech company is simply not enough for Italy’s Acquirente Unico (AU).
The Rome-based governmental organization announced Tuesday that it has purchased a complete set of products and services from Hewlett-Packard , Oracle Corp.
, and Intel
to support its mission as part of the deregulation process of the Italian electricity market.
After purchasing electricity through a power exchange and then reselling it to distributors, AU handles approximately 50 percent of the Italian electricity market for households and small businesses.
HP, Oracle, and Intel were the Italian company’s primary suitors in terms of being able to provide an integrated platform of services that matched AU’s business strategy.
Details of the business deal were handled out of HP’s EMEA headquarters in Europe, which also provides products and services to the Middle East and Africa.
A representative for AU explained that their reason for choosing Intel Architecture over the other RISC options they considered was because the Intel environment encompasses the products and services of many other vendors so that solutions can be perfectly aligned with a company’s exact needs.
“Often for far less cost,” said Sergio Di Carlo of AU.
Five months later, AU ended up with an Intel Architecture to power its financial risk application, running an Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters on Intel-based HP ProLiant DL380 and DL360 servers.
AU chose a Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system that runs on HP Database Clusters. And for its desktops, AU picked Intel Pentium processor-based PCs.
Vedaris’ Contango Suite will provide virus scanning and encryption, the company said. Contango is a multi-currency, multi-commodity, and multi-location global trading risk management solution.
Enel Produzione, one of Italy’s largest power generators, also uses the Contango Suite.
AU also announced plans to upgrade its technical operations by the end of this year by installing HP ProLiant Parallel Database Clusters powered by Intel Xeon processors that feature Intel’s unique Hyper-Threading Technology.
Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology enables a single processor to run two separate threads of software simultaneously and requires a computer system with an Intel Pentium 4 processor at 3.06 GHz or higher and a chipset that utilizes this technology.
“This is just a start,” said Jane McMillian, a spokesperson for HP. “Now that they have the adaptable infrastructure in place, we are planning to grow with them.”
Financial details of the deal were not available from any of the four companies involved.