I worked for a company that had a fairly large OpenVMS installation and had to make the transition from Alpha to Itanium. It required a considerable amount of work and the early iterations of Itanium did not provide a clear performance improvement over the final Alpha EV7z that we had been using in some GS1280s.
Going by my faulty memory, I'd say it wasn't until Tukwila that it was a clear win over Alpha EV7z. By the time Tukwila arrived, it was pretty clear that Itanium's goose was already cooked.
EV7 were introduced after customers refused to upgrade to Integrity over crap performance.