Hewlett-Packard Co and Northern Telecom Ltd have admitted that their jointly-developed Applied Computerised Telephony call-processing server for the HP 9000 and 3000 families, announced last week (CI No 1,336) in fact represents a climb-down from the original charter of the alliance, which was set up to build integrated voice and data networks for key Fortune 1000-listed customers, reports Computer Systems News. Dennis McGinn, Hewlett-Packard’s general manager of industry and accounts marketing, and one of the founders of the Corporate Networks Operation set up specifically for the proposed joint ventures, now admits that the charter was too broad, while director of Corporate Networks Ross Hunt concedes that far from showing interest in the original networking project, customers came back and told us to focus on complementary computing and applications. The announcements of last week are the result of this refocussing, and US analysts are already saying that Corporate Networks, which in the past has been dogged by conflicts between Hewlett-Packard and Northern Telecom salesmen, stands to reap long-term benefits from the switch, which, according to Peter Bernstein at Probe Research Inc, is proof that Hewlett and Northern are looking at enhancing the functionality of their installed base by targetting applications. However, it is also believed that the move towards applications hurried up the demise of Northern’s ill-fated Meridian Data Networking System backbone switch, which was taken from the market last summer: Hunt says there were other alternatives working at Hewlett-Packard, and this may have been a contributing factor in the early disappearance of the switch. Despite all these problems however, McGinn, while refusing to give precise details, is claiming that Corporate Networks is ahead of its modest $1m target for the first year.
