New programme to rally the smaller software vendor
Saying that a study by the Gediman Research Group suggests that small- and medium-sized independent software vendors consider the costs of converting their software for a new architecture, and the subsequent marketing and sales expenses as potentially prohibitive to success, and Hewlett-Packard Co company has launched a new programme to ease the transition to its Precision Architecture RISC-based Unix machines. The programme extends the company’s current vendor-recruitment efforts, and is designed to make it easy and profitable for the smaller vendors to support the HP-UX workstations. The first phase includes substantial discounts on equipment purchase and lease plans and technical conversion support dedicated to the programme to facilitate a smooth migration to Unix systems. Once the application is up on the HP Apollo 9000 Series 700 workstation family, Hewlett-Packard promises to provide marketing and sales programmes, such as promotions, through its direct sales force, resellers and distributors. The membership fee for the programme is $600 a year. To remove financial roadblocks and ensure US programme members’ financial success, the company is offering 52% discounts on appropriate equipment purchases and hardware and software-maintenance support contracts; options for equipment leasing and financing also based on the 52% discount; access to the company’s East Coast and West Coast qualification centres, where access to a network of HP 9000 products and technical assistance is provided free of charge; workday telephone access to technical conversion specialists; and 24-hour electronic bulletin access to engineering notes and product details. On the marketing side, the company promises to foster relationships between programme members and its worldwide distributors, resellers and direct sales force. It will offer direct marketing and mail programmes; hold marketing conferences, seminars and special promotions; provide free listings in catalogues seen by customers; and put their products up on the HP LaserPro CD-ROM for software marketing which is delivered with every Hewlett-Packard workstation. They also get membership of the InterWorks workstation users group. The company says that the programme has already roped in SmartStar Corp, which does proprietary language applications on Digital Equipment Corp hardware; – Inmark Development Corp, which specialises in applications for the banking and brokerage community and tools for the C++ development market; Tivoli Systems Inc with its software for managing distributed computer systems; and The Digist Software Co division of the Turing Institute in Scotland, which provides shrink-wrapped spatial-data-processing applications for the AM/FM and geographic information systems markets. Digist will distribute and support Turing Institute’s products in North America.
Hewlett-Packard will be coming to a bookstall near you
Hewlett-Packard Co has signed Random House Electronic Publishing and Paramount Publishing’s Professional Technical Reference Prentice Hall as its associates in publishing books on Hewlett-Packard technologies and products. Each publisher is to produce, market and distribute books to the retail, wholesale, corporate, government, college and library markets worldwide Random House will establish a new Hewlett-Packard Press to publish books for individual users, Prentice Hall will launch the Hewlett-Packard Professional Books series for practising and studying professionals.
Telnet/OLTP extensions to improve transaction processing efficiency
Customers’ environments are evolving towards intensive use of commercial transaction processing servers, Hewlett-Packard Co suggests, and such users need support for high-performance commercial-grade input-output while minimising communications costs – and they need a system that is compatible with existing applications and networking equipment. Accordingly, the company has teamed with the Wollongong Group Inc and Datability Inc to produce an ARPA Telnet-derived system, Tel
net/OLTP, which is designed to enable computer systems to support more users in large commercial transaction processing environments. Telnet/OLTP is claimed to provide significant gains in transaction processing efficiency by decreasing central computer processing by up to 50% and by decreasing Telnet traffic on the network by up to 90% – and existing Telnet applications are compatible with Telnet/OLTP. The reduction in host overhead should mean that more MIPS can be devoted to executing the transaction processing application, executing more transactions, and supporting more users and more applications. And the capability to cut Telnet network traffic by up to 90% should mean that the network can support additional traffic, translating into less competition for scarce network resources, and remote users should see their line-usage charges fall. The three companies say that they will incorporate Telnet/OLTP into a broad range of products – Hewlett plans to incorporate Telnet/OLTP into the HP 9000 series 800 business server line and into its terminal server product line. Wollongong, Palo Alto, California plans to use it in its open systems interconnection communications product line for the Digital Equipment Corp VAX, and Datability, Carlstadt, New Jersey plans to incorporate it for its communications server product line. The first products supporting the Telnet/OLTP extensions are expected to be available in the middle of the year.
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Hewlett and partners launch Earth Data System
Hewlett-Packard Co has teamed up with Ellery Systems Inc and scientists from the US environmental community to exploit the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment to create a computer-based system designed to make it easier and less costly to collect data about global environmental issues such as ozone depletion, deforestation and climate change. The new Earth Data System is designed to facilitate the collection and analysing of environmental-impact data by enabling the data to be gathered from many different types of computers that are geographically dispersed and often incompatible. Initial test copies of the Earth Data System, which incorporates Boulder, Colorado-based Ellery software, began shipping in October 1992, and are running on Hewlett workstations at five US locations including universities and research centres, for example enabling researchers analysing the Pacific Northwest to look at environmental data from their desktop to help forest managers to decide where to cut and replant trees without disrupting wildlife.
