FROM THE CHAIR
In the last issue of PING I commented that all was very quiet at HP, we had had no new product news for what felt like a long time. Well, HP have responded to this tacit challenge, and I am sure it had nothing at all to do with this column! It seems, however, that I was not alone in this opinion. Nick Earle of HP (now world-wide marketing manager for the Enterprise Services Group - not bad for an ex sales rep from Manchester, but it just shows what appearing at an HP/Works event can do for you), gave an interview recently in which he admitted HP "took it's eye off the Unix ball," and has been accused of getting too close to MicroSoft. HP's strategy is to continue to back both Unix and NT, but Nick's job is to "put HP on top of the marketing heap around Unix."
Two events in the last quarter indicate they are serious about this. Firstly, HP-UX 11 has arrived! It will not be hitting your desktops just yet but in November I attended the Product Launch for Independent Software Vendors in Bracknell. Steve Boniwell describes this event in more detail later in this issue but for now let me just whet your appetite by telling you that UX-11 is binary compatible with previous versions of the operating system (as you would expect) and that it offers 32- and 64-bit operation. UX-11 should have begun shipping on November 17 but for now it is only a server release; workstation users will have to wait until mid 1998. If you want to know more take a look at:
Secondly, the wraps seem to have come off the Merced chip, the 64-bit collaboration between HP and Intel which promises Unix and Windows operations on the same chip. For quite a while it appeared that HP did not have a lot to say about the chip, indeed when I was at the InterWorks Conference in April it was hardly mentioned. It seemed that HP were trying hard not to talk about it. Merced is now back in the news, with a catchy new name for the program - EPIC, short for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. The design is the next step in the evolution of the chip, which has so far seen CISC and then RISC incarnations. As the name implies, the chip supports parallel operation, running "more than a dozen" computational operations simultaneously, and at a clock speed of "roughly 900 million cycles per second". There is a very good article on the 'Killer Chip' in a recent issue of Fortune magazine. It's on the web but the URL is almost unintelligible so start at http://www.fortune.com/ then follow links to Content, then Archive then November 10 1997.
In the same place you will find an article on 'Ten Tech Trends To Bet On'. Positive publicity for HP here too, as it notes they are going after document copying and digital photography business and taking on the likes of Xerox and Kodak.
So what of NT? The integration events we have run have been some of our most popular and it's clear that, like it or loath it, you cannot ignore it. Just as HP has a dual strategy, I believe it's time for HP/Works to take on the technological diversity of our mentor company. In February 1998 we will run our first 'NT Focus Group' workshop.
As I write we are still working on the date, venue and agenda and I need some help. I need to know what you need to know about NT. What are the issues we should address and get answers to? Indeed if there is an 'NT-guru' out there who would like to shape the development of this group I would like to hear from you. Of course, we can no more separate the two operating systems than can HP. Unix is safe and well in the hands of HP/Works, we will not decrease our support and services, (and we still of course support many Apollo users), but we intend to enhance what we can offer by embracing NT also. See you in February!
