Hewlett-Packard Co and Persistence Software Inc have signed a joint marketing agreement to use Persistence’s transaction processing oriented application server on HP Unix and NT servers. San Mateo, California-based Persistence already ships its PowerTier product line on HP servers, and has a number of shared customers, including AT&T Co, Boeing, Lucent Technologies Inc, NASA and Nokia Oy. It says the agreement includes a collaboration for optimizing the performance of PowerTier for HP-UX 11.0-based servers from HP. Persistence has a similar agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc, with whom it has been collaborating on Enterprise Java Beans. HP will take both the C++ version of PowerTier and the forthcoming Enterprise Java Beans version, first demonstrated at Java One earlier this year and due to be shipped very soon. PowerTier provides a rapid application environment for customers developing distributed component applications. A set of services are made available to the object components via so-called container managed persistence, and the product also provides object-relational mapping and caching for large scale distributed applications. HP already has a joint development project with WebLogic for its Tengah Java application server (CI No 3,428), but Persistence believes this is a low-end, workgroup system. It claims that other application servers, such as Kiva (now Netscape Application Server), Netdynamics (now owned by Sun) and Silverstream, which has partnered with IBM Corp, all address the HTML-oriented Web serving market and don’t address online transaction processing applications. Iona and BEA Systems Inc sit at the top end of the market, although Persistence says it has partnered with both.
