SMBTA NEWS…

For Information: Ron Sharp, 469-648-0190 (rsharp@smbta.com )

August 3, 2006

Time is Money For Small Businesses, New Technology May Offer Bottom-Line Savings

SMBTA: Understanding Technology ‘Best Practices’ Enable Small Businesses to Reap Big Rewards

With as many as 150 million PCs older than four years still in use worldwide, it’s time for small businesses (SBs) to consider refreshing essential technology tools, advised the Small Medium Business Technology Alliance (SMBTA), a national alliance established to help the nation’s 25 million SBs understand how technology can further growth.

“We believe the latest innovations in technology provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to differentiate themselves from the competition. SBs, who are at the forefront of adopting new technologies from computers to wireless, can improve efficiency, reduce business costs and utilize technology to provide world class customer service,” said Chuck Sharp, President, SMBTA. “Smart small business decision makers are utilizing new PCs that allow them to integrate voice and data, improve data and network security, and develop and implement industry applications as a strategic IT advantage that solves crucial business problems.”

Replacing Aging PCs A High Priority

According to SMBTA, there are three important reasons why SBs should replace aging computers and related equipment – security, maintenance / support costs and employee / business productivity.

Security is a top concern of all businesses and older computers are a potential security risk due to their aging operating system software. Older operating systems are not supported by the manufacturer and don’t receive security patches, which can leave security holes in a company’s IT environment, exposing an SB to unnecessary data and legal risk. SBs with inadequate PC security or with PCs that cannot appropriately manage security patches run the risk of losing business and government contracts. Additionally, older PCs may not have the performance needed to adequately run virus software, impacting both security and productivity.

Old PCs May Cost More Than New Ones

Small businesses can use PC technology to enhance competitiveness and growth by enabling more efficient customer service, business processes and employee response times. Older PCs negatively impact productivity and can have higher support and maintenance costs when compared to newer technology. Industry analysts estimate that support expenses for desktops that are less that three years old cost approximately $200 per PC, per year, whereas desktops that are three-to-four years old cost more than twice that amount.

In addition to choosing a three-year PC lifecycle, SBs should consider standardizing their installed base so there are fewer configurations to manage which can reduce overall costs. Wipro Nervewire, a consultant for IT solutions and services, conducted a study of PC infrastructure complexity within large companies and found that they could average $270 in savings per PC, per year by reducing the number of PC configurations. SMBTA believes that the conclusions are applicable to SBs.

Old PCs Slow Down Employees

Industry analysts estimate that almost half of all productivity gains in the past decade depended on IT investments. SMBTA’s Sharp pointed out SB employees do their best work when provided with powerful, feature-rich PCs that aid productivity and allow them stay connected and work from anywhere in the world.

“SBs can create a highly mobile, flexible work environment and show a rapid return on investment from different technologies such as combining wirelessly-enabled notebooks such as those equipped with Intel Centrino Duo Mobile Technology, wireless LANs and voice over Internet protocol,” Sharp said.

Refresh Tips For SBs

Members of SMBTA offered “Best Practices” to SB decision makers on adopting new computer technologies:

• Invest in a higher mobile mix to increase productivity. Mobile, or wireless, computing is a strong business differentiator. SBs should initially consider adopting wireless notebooks for one third to one half of their employees, particularly when refreshing their older PCs. The recent reduction in the price of notebook computers offsets the slightly higher total cost of ownership of a notebook computer compared to a desktop PC is quickly paid back when notebook users extend their work by only a few hours each week.

• Mobile technology users report they look for the following qualities in their notebook PCs: high performance, long battery life, integrated wireless LAN capability, and thinner/lighter form factors.

• Consider installing a wireless local area network (LAN). Growing, changing SBs can eliminate the additional costs of running cables throughout the office to every PC. The cost of rearranging workspaces with cabling can increase costs from 40-60 percent, as well as reduce employee productivity. Using a wireless network costs a fraction of a wired infrastructure and allows employees to work from their desk, a conference room or the café.

• Purchase PCs with “transparent security.” New PCs should have enough performance to allow future software security to be loaded providing personal firewalls, advanced virus protection and other features. Newer PCs also have recent operating systems which are supported from a security perspective by the manufacturer.

• Buy “performance.” Performance PCs enable greater employee and business productivity. SB employees will be more responsive to customers and changing business conditions when their PCs have sufficient performance to multitask and stay connected anytime, anywhere.

• Replace desktop PCs every three years, laptops after two years.

• Write off your equipment. Small businesses can write off on new equipment purchases, take a tax break now and invest in new technologies. By so doing, SBs can use new equipment—from PCs to printers—to perform critical marketing functions themselves, such as producing professional-quality sales collateral, building a convincing Web presence or having the ability to respond to customer needs from any location and time zone.

• Take advantage of manufacturers promotions. Small businesses should investigate and capitalize on special promotional offers from manufacturers and/or resellers. For instance, Intel is offering small business travelers who purchase an Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology notebook computer a free “Relax Pack” valued at $400. See www.intel.com/go/relax for all the program details, including service availability. (Additional promotions can be found at www.hp.com/sbso or www.smbta.com ).

SMBTA’s Web site (www.smbta.com ) is an excellent source of business advice promotions and helpful information for small business decision makers.

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About SMBTA and ASBTA:

SMBTA is a national organization dedicated to serving and educating small businesses regarding technology. American Small Business Travelers Alliance is focused on helping businesses better utilize travel. If you're a small business owner and want to learn more or become a member for free, visit our sites – www.asbta.com and www.smbta.com. Members of the media can receive a free copy of survey results by contacting ASBTA by phone at 469-648-0190 or email at surveys@asbta.com.

New Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 Processor Doubles Performance, Reduces Power Consumption

Aggressive Growth in Itanium Hardware and Software Solutions Deliver Mission Critical Computing Freedom

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 18, 2006 – Intel Corporation today unveiled five new products in the Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 Processor 9000 series. Previously codenamed “Montecito,” the new processors are designed for the most sophisticated high-end computing platforms in the world. They double the performance and lower energy requirements, improving performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to existing, single-core versions. All server-maker members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) will launch new Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series-based products.

The flagship 9050 model features two complete processing cores and nearly triples the cache or memory reservoir versus Intel’s previous generation. It also can execute four instructions or threads per processor enhanced by Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology).

The new Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors represent the world’s most intricate product design to date with more than 1.7 billion transistors. This allows Intel designers to deliver new features to the Itanium processor family that create robust virtualization capabilities, enhanced cache reliability and other mainframe-like capabilities.

Unlike products from the remaining RISC vendors, the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series offers end-user freedom through a broad choice of software with more than 8,000 applications in production. Itanium processor-based servers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems are unique in the industry. They provide mission critical support for Windows*, Linux*, UNIX* and other operating systems as well as new migration tools off of proprietary servers and mainframes - delivering unbeatable flexibility and a confident adoption path for IT managers to migrate to a standards-based architecture.

The Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor 9000 series delivers performance at a system scale unmatched by competing RISC architectures. It set world record results in several key server benchmarks including a score of 4230 SPEC_int_rate_base_20001, nearly triple the previous record.

“Intel remains focused on removing the proprietary shackles that remain in the high-end of the server market segment, and with Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors we are delivering unprecedented IT freedom with a product that excels in performance, reliability and improved energy efficiency,” said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager, Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. “The broad system and software support for Itanium 2 processors enables CIOs to move away from aging and expensive legacy systems and instead direct those funds toward standard-based computing and business innovation.

“In virtually all areas, momentum for Itanium-based systems is growing. More applications were added during the first half this year than were available in 2003 and more than 70 percent of the top Global 100 companies are choosing Itanium technology. In addition, the Itanium Solutions Alliance has committed $10 billion of hardware support through 2010 to the architecture.”

Dual-core Itanium® 2-based systems target the most compute intensive areas, such as business analytics, large data warehouses and HPC areas. This is increasingly important as companies continue to strive for real-time decision making based on increasingly large amounts of data; and scientists, engineers and researchers seek to solve medical, climatic and other challenges through the use of computing power. The Itanium 2 processor’s Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture design provides high levels of parallelism and computational capabilities, driving greater efficiency into analytics applications and business intelligence software.

“Microsoft Windows Server 2003* and Microsoft SQL Server 2005* on the new dual-core, multi-threaded Itanium 2 processor will provide exceptional performance, scalability and reliability to enterprise customers with database workloads and line of business applications,” said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. “Microsoft is resolute in its support of the Itanium architecture, today and in the future.”

Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT)

Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) is built into Itanium® 2 processors to enhance support for OEM and industry virtual machine monitors (VMMs). The built-in scalability, performance and industry leading reliability capabilities of Itanium 2-based servers provide an outstanding platform for consolidating proprietary solutions onto industry standards-based servers. Virtualization can help lower the total cost of ownership by assisting with the migration and consolidation of different software applications from proprietary platforms to industry standard hardware and operating systems.

Supporting the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series are two rack-optimized Intel server systems: SR870BH2 and SR870BN4. These server systems provide the optimum performance, reliability and expandability that scalable business solutions and mission-critical applications demand and are available today to OEMs and systems integrators for enterprise and high-performance computing.

Pricing and availability

Intel dual- and single-core Itanium 2 processors are shipping today with systems coming available in late August and growing throughout the year.

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.

Intel and Itanium 2 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

1: result published on www.spec.org

Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of Intel products as measured by those tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance. Buyers should consult other sources of information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing. For more information on performance tests and on the performance of Intel products, visit www.intel.com/performance/resources/limits.htm or call (U.S.) 1-800-628-8686 or 1-916-356-3104.

Configuration details: Performance Claim: Based on SPEC publication (SPECint_rate_base_2000

Source www.spec.org: Itanium® 2 processor results of 4230 on SGI Altix 4700 system, using 128 Itanium® 2 processors (128 processors, 256 Cores), 1.6GHz with 24MB L3 cache, 512GB memory, SGI ProPACK 4 SP3 OS, published on 18th July'2006. IBM Corporation has published highest result of 1063 on IBM eServer p5 595 (1900 MHz, 64 CPU), 64 cores, 32 chips, 2 cores/chip (SMT on), 256 GB memory and on OS AIX 5L V5.3, published in Oct'2004. Sun Microsystems has published a result of 1213 on Sun Fire E25K (72 processor), 144 cores, 72 chips, 2 cores/chip, UltraSPARC IV+, 1.5Ghz, 288 GB memory, on Solaris 10 and result published in Dec'2005.