The effort is intended to help customers increase business performance, reduce costs, and mitigate risks when moving from mainframes to server environments. Called the Application Modernization Initiative, the program features Oracle Fusion middleware, professional services from HP and HP's Integrity servers running Intel Itanium processors. It will be officially announced at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco by HP Chairman, CEO, and President Mark Hurd during a keynote presentation.

"There's a growing challenge which customers face, which is this whole issue around legacy," said Paul Evans, worldwide director of application modernization services at HP. Legacy software is still holding back users, he said.

"The problem is these legacy environments are 10, 20, 30 years old," but customers perceive a risk in moving to an environment based more on distributed services, Evans said.

"What we've done is we've taken pieces from Intel, HP and Oracle and [composed] them into a reference architecture," he said.

Businesses face the risk of not being able to manage change, and many companies trace constraints on businesses to the limitations of older information systems architecture, HP said. A mainframe-based environment can make it difficult to attain the low-cost responsiveness that enterprises need from their applications, especially on older mainframes, the company said. But modernizing also presents risks in the process and final result, HP said.