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HP Leaves Developers Behind


By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
August 15, 2002 — 
As you know by now, Hewlett-Packard has decided to get out of the middleware business. Specifically, say goodbye to Netaction Application Server, Netaction Web Services Platform and Web Services Registry. They're toast. (See "HP Dumps J2EE Software Stack," Aug. 1, page 1.)

So I decided to do a totally unscientific survey of my Java developer friends. I called and e-mailed a dozen or so of them and asked about their use of HP products. Almost all of them had HP printers, three of them had HP Pavilion desktops, and one develops for HP-UX, the company's flavor of Unix. One had used Bluestone, before HP acquired it in the fall of 2000.

None of them had ever used HP's Netaction.

Giga Information Group says that HP had owned only a miserable 4 percent of the application server market. I'm surprised it was that high.

At one time, I did know some people who were in love with eSpeak, HP's pre-Web services platform, but it went nowhere fast. I also knew some people who liked Bluestone. Some analysts also thought that HP had had a chance to become a major power in Web services. That was then. This is now.

Today, I can find lots of WebSphere developers, plenty of WebLogic coders, a swarm of iPlanet programmers and a surprising number of hackers working away with Jakarta. It doesn't take an Ada Lovelace to figure out that HP had made a $470 million mistake in buying Bluestone.

But was it only HP's misstep, or is this the start of a trend of major companies moving away from middleware? I don't see it. Sun and IBM are both doing very well by bundling operating system, middleware and Java tools into one package. Oracle, by joining forces with Dell for hardware and with Red Hat for an operating system, is following in IBM's and Sun's footsteps, only it's doing it with alliances in-house instead.

No, I think HP was in a unique situation. It squandered its eSpeak technology lead. Indeed, at the same time it put Netaction to rest, it finally admitted that eSpeak was as dead as a Norwegian Blue Parrot pining for the fjords.

By the time HP had finished bringing Bluestone on board, the other J2EE companies had taken the lion's share of the Java middleware market. Add a nasty fight over the wisdom of acquiring Compaq and then just the sheer work of merging two giant companies, and HP's Java-based middleware didn't stand a chance.

Looked at in this way, although it will infuriate many developers who have been left stranded by this move, the only thing that's remarkable about HP's move is that Carly Fiorina took so long to pull the trigger. HP's chance-if it ever had one-to be a middleware power was gone.

Too bad she misfired. Oh, it looks good on one level. HP has announced that it is strengthening its partnership with Microsoft for .NET on its Windows boxes and with BEA for its Linux and Unix systems. Developers and customers who haven't had a relationship with HP because they wanted a packaged middleware, hardware and operating system deal but didn't care for HP's middleware offerings might be tempted to give it a try. Existing customers? Ha! That's another matter.

The misfire is that the current customers have been left hanging. HP promises to make all things clear by Sept. 15 with a detailed migration plan. That won't be soon enough for the company's enterprise customers and developers. Granted, there couldn't have been many of them, but they deserved better than this. After all, rather than going with the more popular J2EE solutions or giving .NET a try, they had elected to stick by HP. HP's moves have been annoying a lot of both HP's and Compaq's old customers. This move doesn't help.

So what happens now to all that HP middleware? No one has a good answer. The rumor mill has it that Oracle may end up buying parts or all of it. After all, Oracle's sales are slumping, and Bluestone, in its day, had a very good reputation. There may be some good left in the products for Oracle to mine. Or, perhaps more likely, Oracle could use experienced HP/Bluestone middleware engineers and developers to incorporate the best of Netaction into the Oracle9i Application Server since it's not setting the world on fire.

Regardless of the middleware's fate, I'm sure of one thing. HP has alienated many of its customers. The real beneficiaries will be its competitors. Sun, IBM and the trio of Dell, Red Hat and Oracle are more likely to gain than BEA and Microsoft, HP's preferred middleware partners.


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