Intelligent Enterprise

Walk This Way

HP's Bluestone Acquisition is the latest maneuver to challenge Sun and IBM for e-business dominance

In Brief

Clean slate: Ebusiness vendor MicroStrategy Inc. has agreed to settle two lawsuits prompted by the company's restated financial results for 1997, 1998, and 1999. MicroStrategy will give shareholders more than $80 million in unsecured promissory notes, stock, and warrants. MicroStrategy said it revised its revenues on March 20, 2000 in accordance with SEC accounting provisions, but the restated earnings surprised the market, causing MicroStrategy share value to plummet 62 percent in one day, eventually bottoming out at $16.75 from a high on March 10 of $333. HP has announced its intent to join IBM, Ariba, Microsoft, and other ecommerce vendors in the Universal, Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) project. UDDI participants are creating a registry standard for businesstobusiness (B2B) applications and marketplaces. HP will also contribute its espeak technology to the effort. Who's buying whom: Embarcadero Technologies Inc., a database lifecycle management solution vendor, has acquired Advanced Software Technologies and its GDPro ecommerce app development tool. German ebusiness giant Software AG has announced its pending acquisition of Saga Systems Inc., the parent company of Saga Software, purveyor of enterprise application integration (EAI) products and services. The International Organization for Standards (ISO) has adopted the CORBA interoperability standard from the Object Management Group (OMG) as the international standard ISO/IEC 195002. OMG said that CORBA's new designation will increase its acceptance as a worldwide, accredited standard.

Judging from Hewlett-Packard's walk and talk of the last seven months, it seems safe to conclude that the company wants to be ubiquitous in the background of an e-commerce world. It is working on having top-to-bottom products and services, either as possessions or partners, that can enable application service providers and managed service providers, as well as in-house systems that support e-business practices. The company is also participating in e-marketplace infrastructure building and standards creation. Finally, Hewlett-Packard (HP) also has an OS for smart appliances.

HP has steadily been fulfilling an April declaration to become a stronger player in the Internet commerce space. Most recently, as of press time, HP added Bluestone Software Inc.'s application server to its incomplete collection of e-business-enabling products and services. The company was simultaneously still flirting with the notion of acquiring PricewaterhouseCoopers' global management and information technology consulting practice. HP had announced plans several months earlier to bolster its e-commerce consulting arm.

HP spokespeople reinforced the April statement by telling TechWeb News in June that the company was moving aggressively into e-commerce, planning to provide "all three tiers" - Web serving, application serving, and database serving. Its HP UX 11i OS - although still almost a year off - is meant to challenge Sun's Solaris in scalability and reliability and will be bundled with Web services such as content distribution server and search engine, both from Inktomi, and the Apache HTTP server. Bluestone fulfills the application serving component.

Bluestone, a respected J2EE- and XML-based application server, was not selling nearly as well as BEA Systems' WebLogic or IBM's WebSphere. Many attribute these bigger-selling app servers' dominance to their inclusion of already popular message-oriented middleware: BEA's Tuxedo and IBM's Tivoli. Perhaps Bluestone will reach more of its potential when sold as part of a configuration.

Just before the Bluestone acquisition, HP inked a deal with VerticalNet to collaborate on the Open Services Marketplace (OSM), a platform for dynamic B2B integration. The company had already been working since May with Impiric to incorporate BroadVision Inc.'s and Moai Technologies Inc.'s products in a B2B portal. HP also supports B2B standards, such as the Business Process Management Initiative (www.BPMI.org), the Transaction Authority Markup Language (XAML), and the UDDI project (www.UDDI.org).

Last but certainly not least, HP's headway in the smart appliance sector, with its ChaiServer Embedded Virtual Machine, has the potential to extend well beyond the printer market. However, no plans to do so have been announced.

With a well-known, diverse, reliable hardware line spanning most requirement levels, portal and app server software, consulting services, hosted services, product partnerships, and involvement in standards creation, HP has its e-commerce bases covered. Sun and IBM have a potentially formidable rival.

HP's long-proven strength lies in its malleability, so all we can expect is that HP will grow successful lines of business and spin off or sell off what doesn't pay off. If the company has a totally different identity a year from now, you shouldn't be too surprised.

---Jeanette Burriesci