Hewlett-Packard Co is seeking to resolve confusion amongst its HP-UX Unix server customers, apparently alarmed by a series of announcements emerging from the company and partner Computer Associates International Inc. It all began on July 14 at CA-World conference in New Orleans with Computer Associates unveiling a global agreement under which HP had agreed to bundle CA’s Unicenter TNG Framework with all HP-UX servers and workstations. The software, a limited version of the Unicenter TNG (the next generation) product, includes a two and three-dimensional Web- based graphical user interface, discovery and event management services and a standards-compliant object repository. However as part of the agreement Hewlett Packard also became a reseller of the complete Unicenter offering, billed by CA as an end-to-end enterprise-management solution. Problems arose when existing HP- UX server customers thought the Palo Alto, California-based company was abandoning support for its homegrown enterprise- management system, OpenView. Two days later the company announced its OpenView-Ready program, delivering pre-configured versions of its software on HP 9000 Unix servers and Dell Computer Corp PC network servers. Bob Simpson, Hewlett Packard’s network systems management division marketing manager asserted: CA’s sales force will aggressively market Unicenter; people may claim we’re not committed to OpenView, that’s clearly not the case. He insisted: Computer Associates and OpenView are head-to-head competitors, this is clearly not any kind of collaborative agreement over OpenView. And just to underline the point he added: CA evolved for mainframe management but the world’s moving towards open systems. It’s going to be a challenge for them; they’re getting behind in that arena. But given the recent emphasis on OpenView for Windows NT, what’s the future for OpenView on Unix? Says Simpson: There’s no freeze on the Unix platform – we’ve got a roadmap till the year 2000.
