Hewlett-Packard Co is now thought to be closing in for a stake in Taligent we wrote way back in February last year (CI No 2,112): well the on-off-on story of 1993 finally materialised yesterday when it was announced that the Cupertino company would be taking a 15% stake in Taligent. The stake will be in the form of new shares, diluting founders IBM Corp and Apple Computer Inc to 42.5% each – or a bit less, since Hewlett is described as the third major shareholder, suggesting that principals at Taligent may have a few shares. So much for gossip that Apple was so keen for cash and to step back from Taligent that the shares would come from the Apple holding. The sum Hewlett is paying was not disclosed – it is said to be over $10m – but it gets a seat on the board and early access to Taligent’s object-oriented technology – which is no longer being touted as an operating system, but rather as a software environment that sits atop a variety of operating systems, ranging from IBM’s OS/2, to Unix to Microsoft Corp’s NT. Taligent will use the cash from Hewlett-Packard to fund further product development and to adapt Taligent’s code to run on the Precision Architecture RISC workstations under HP-UX Unix. Taligent – which now has 350 employees and expects to grow to 450 this year – says it will continue to license its technology, but will not necessarily seek other investors. If there was the right kind of investor we’d be interested in talking to them, but it’s not a burning issue at this point, chief executive Joe Guglielmi said. Hewlett-Packard is interested in tools that Taligent has developed rather than offering the full environment. The technologies Hewlett is licensing are the Taligent Applications Framework, Development System, and Objects Framework. In return, Hewlett is licensing to Taligent its Distributed Object Management Facility, a core component of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture, and components of its DCE/9000 version of the Distributed Computing Environment. Separately, Taligent says it will work with X/Open Co Ltd to get the application programming interfaces for its Applications Framework accepted as an open industry standard and license it to third parties. It hopes to have the initial Applications Framework tool-kit in the hands of its owners and third parties by mid-year.
