The Itanium Solutions Alliance has announced that XDelta has been awarded an honourable mention for its entry in the 'Humanitarian Impact' category of the 2009 Itanium Innovation Awards programme.
XDelta designed and implemented the multi-site, disaster-tolerant system platform for the 'Pulse Renewal' project for the National Health Service Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) organisation.
The Pulse system manages the entire supply chain of blood products, from donation, testing and blood-product production, to the safe and timely issue of blood products across England and North Wales.
Lynda Hamlyn, chief executive of NHS Blood and Transplant said: 'Our Pulse database system stores information on each blood donor and blood donor session.
'It enables us to track every blood component from donation to when it is supplied to a hospital.
It is vital to the operations of the National Blood Service.
She added: 'The effective implementation of information technology has enabled a single resilient database which has improved efficiency, reduced data duplication and lowered business costs.' The organisations that collaborated to deliver the project were: NHSBT; Savant; Mimer; OCSL; XDelta; HP; DTCS; and OpenVMS Engineering.
The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards were designed to recognise and reward end users and developers for outstanding use of Intel Itanium-based servers in their applications.
A panel of judges evaluated submissions on a number of criteria such as difficulty of challenge, results produced, and originality of the solution.
The Humanitarian Impact category awards the innovative use of Itanium-based systems to deliver results that benefit humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts.
Examples include natural-disaster modelling and prediction, resource management, health-care advances, and biosciences research.
