Is Hewlett-Packard abandoning its Unix commitment? Sun thinks so Sun says it's the only leader in the Unix space; HP says Sun's just running scared

March  1997

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San Francisco (March 25, 1997) -- Hoping to make hay from Hewlett-Packard's recently announced decision to embrace and extend its Microsoft NT product and service offerings, Sun Microsystems is suggesting that the agreement is a sure sign that HP is weakening its commitment to Unix. In fact, Sun has posted an open letter on www.sun.com, suggesting that HP is merely "becoming a channel for Microsoft." HP says that Sun ought to be ashamed of its tactics and that Sun, worried over the future of its UltraSPARC processor, is acting out of desperation.

Despite the mud slinging it has provoked, HP and Microsoft's high-profile announcement, made at HP's corporate headquarters on March 19, 1997, seems more significant as an endorsement of NT in the mission-critical enterprise environment than for any specific product deliverables. HP has pledged to endorse and adopt certain parts of Microsoft's technology, but the company did not announce any new products. The most significant change to come of the alliance seems to be HP's introduction of enterprise-level support services for Microsoft's NT and BackOffice products. Still, HP and Microsoft appear to be taking the alliance seriously. Both Bill Gates and HP CEO Lew Platt were on hand in Palo Alto, CA, to show the flag.

Of course, the mission-critical enterprise market just happens to be the bread and butter of Sun, which has not hesitated to play up fears that HP's future is becoming increasingly tied to NT at the expense of its own HP-UX operating system. Rich Sevcik, HP's vice president of system technology, denies this, saying that Sun is afraid of having its RISC architecture overtaken by HP's next-generation Merced chip. He adds that Merced will not only outperform the UltraSPARC, but will also run both NT and Unix. Merced is not expected to ship until either late 1998 or 1999, so HP's performance numbers would seem to be somewhat preliminary. Sevcik does admit that there will be "some competition" between NT and HP-UX, but he insists that both operating systems represent multibillion dollar businesses. "Unix," he explains, "will focus on the high end; NT will focus on the workstation."

Whatever doubts may have been raised, it seems unlikely that HP will give up on HP-UX any time soon. Jean Bozman, IDC's research manager for the Unix and server operating environment group, says that such a move would be premature since it's earning HP a healthy $6 billion annually and continues to grow. "There is," she says, "some indication that...the workstation market...is beginning to be affected by the entrance of NT." However, "it doesn't appear that the growth of the NT server has had a severe impact on Unix servers."

Solaris Marketing Group Manager Remy Malan disagrees. "This is really a stepping away from Unix," he says. Malan is doubtful that HP and Microsoft will be able to market competing products on the same hardware (i.e. Merced), facetiously calling it a "happy world where NT lives alongside with HP. "If that is the strategy for putting HP-UX on Intel," Malan cautions, "it's asking for trouble." Malan also criticizes HP for dropping the ball on open standards. "When everybody talks about heterogeneous environments here, they're really talking about HP and Microsoft."

What exactly did HP announce?

• Rejecting the Oracle/IBM/Sun camp's Network Computer effort, HP says it will ship an HP Net Vectra PC for "about $1,000" in the latter half of 1997. This machine will conform to the Net PC specification created last fall by Microsoft and Intel and will employ Microsoft's Zero Administration Windows technology.

• HP will end the life of its OpenMail for NT product, and will, instead, recommend Microsoft Exchange to its customers. OpenMail will remain in its HP-UX form. The two companies have pledged to make messaging work between OpenMail and Exchange. To this end they plan to leverage unspecified "industry standards." OpenMail currently uses an X.400 messaging backbone.

• Though it did not specify when, HP says it will add two new enterprise-level NT support services to its HP-UX offerings, called Critical Systems Support and Personalized Systems Support.

• HP and Microsoft will jointly staff Microsoft's Enterprise Solution Center in Redmond, WA to work on optimizing NT in HP environments.

• Management functions from Microsoft's forthcoming clustering technology, code-named "Wolfpack", will be integrated into the HP OpenView platform. Wolfpack also gets HP's endorsement as "the strategic, high-availability product for Microsoft Windows NT Server."

• Also on the management front, HP says it will incorporate the Microsoft-supported Common Information Model (CIM), currently being standardized through the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF), into OpenView.

• HP will port its Virtual Vault transaction technology to NT.

--Robert McMillan

Resources

• Sun's letter on the HP-Microsoft announcement
  http://www.sun.com/970311/beyondthehype.html
• Details on the HP-Microsoft announcement
  http://www.hp.com/wcso-support/services/SECPressRel.html

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URL: http://www.sunworld.com/swol-03-1997/swol-03-hp.html
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