In an effort to check both Digital Equipment Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc’s lead in the Ada defence software market, Hewlett-Packard Co is giving Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire-based Alsys Ltd its Ada offerings. To wit, Alsys, very strong in the defence market, now has responsibility for the development, marketing and support of all Hewlett-Packard Ada compilation systems and related tool sets operating on HP 9000 workstations and business systems. The HP 700 products were originally based on Alsys technology and Alsys will continue developing, marketing and maintaining these products as well as shipping new versions of the product supporting HP-UX 8.0 on the Series 800, and will follow up with a new version supporting the Series 400 and 300 workstations. Alsys will also take over the Ada/Softbench offering along with a suite of Ada bindings to HP-UX, X Library, X Toolkit and Motif. Intriguingly, Alsys, part of Thomson-CSF since October last year, is charged with providing the Ada development environment as part of Thomson’s drive into the global software engineering market. Why intriguing? Because one of Alsys’ siblings in the Thomson-CSF Information Technology Group is Atherton Technology Inc, whose backplane technology is seen as a rival to Hewlett’s SoftBench. Doesn’t this put Alsys in an invidious position? Alsys UK general manager John Walker doesn’t think so. He says Alsys has not decided whether to make SoftBench or Atherton the backplane of the Thomson Ada software engineering thrust. In choosing, Alsys has to weigh up two objectives: which technology has greater market share and is more attractive to third parties and which technology will be the standard internally at Thomson for engineering. Stating these two objectives, the choice doesn’t seem easy to me – SoftBench is streets ahead in the market and Thomson would be acting very peculiarly if it didn’t use Atherton internally. Another factor will be how easy the chosen technology is to convert for environments other than Hewlett’s. For example, the Alsys tools use the Ada World menu system to invoke tools whereas Hewlett developed the HP 700 products to run with SoftBench instead which offers a Motif interface. Alsys is in two minds whether to revert to Ada World. This decision depends on how easy it is to convert the SoftBench environment with Alsys tools to other operating systems, although Walker recognises Alsys will have to provide standard interfaces like Motif and Open Look if it sticks with Ada World. – Katy Ring
