Oracle isn’t alone in wanting to abandon Intel’s ill-received Itanium platform. A year after derailing the database maker’s plan to halt software development for the chip, Hewlett Packard is porting its Nonstop line of high-availability systems to x86 server architecture.

Originally marketed under the Tandem brand, NonStop is used primarily by telcos and financial service providers to power their mission-critical workloads. These companies and others are increasingly turning to standard-based data center solutions as the volume of information continues to grow faster than the ability of legacy infrastructure to accommodate it all.

HP, which accounts for more than 95 percent of the world’s Itanium server shipments, is modernizing its enterprise portfolio in a bid to capitalize on this trend. The vendor hopes to deliver an x86 implementation of NonStop within a few years, leaving customers plenty of time to prepare for the transition. To make things even simpler, the tech titan will offer migration support through its Technology Services group.

“Giving customers the power to leverage open standards for HP NonStop environments is a game-changing rebirth for the platform,” commented Harry Scott, the co-founder of HP NonStop partner Scott Software. “It’s a move that demonstrates HP’s interest in having the NonStop platform remain the cornerstone for mission-critical enterprise class systems.”

Hewlett Packard is addressing the Big Data explosion across the entire stack. In the software arena, Meg Whitman’s firm is going after consumer-facing companies with unified contact center analytics.

The recently introduced Qfinity 10 platform adds tighter integration with Autonomy’s IDOL search tool and support for mix workloads consisting of audio, text and video. The release also featuring two new modules for enhancing agent productivity and monitoring contact center operations.