Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft both announced Web services applications
Monday designed for one purpose — eating away at IBM’s
share in the infrastructure software industry.
HP and BEA Systems, Inc.
, are rolling
out BEA’s WebLogic Server 7.0 on the HP-UX 11i, while Microsoft is pushing its application analyzer for Lotus Notes, hoping to
migrate IBM users to a .Net platform.
Microsoft’s Paul Flessner, .Net enterprise server senior vice president,
fired the opening salvo, saying his company is situated to offer a better
product and that the analyzer is tailor-made to migrate Lotus Notes
customers away from IBM and onto the .Net platform.
“While customers have received value from Notes over the years, they are
increasingly finding that using a monolithic product to address a wide
range of business needs does not provide the performance, scalability and
manageability an enterprise requires,” he said.
Tod Nielsen, chief marketing officer for BEA Systems, chimed in with his
company’s application, saying IBM customers, among others, would benefit
from the HP-BEA name brand offering.
“The HP and BEA alliance is proving to be a formidable force in the
marketplace,” he said. “The bundling initiative is just the beginning of a
strategic effort to combine application development and hardware
optimization efforts in order to offer enterprise customers exceptional
solutions backed by the reliability of two of the industry’s most respected
leaders.”
Microsoft and HP are trying to build up an enterprise following for a
real-time back-office software product in a market dominated by IBM and its
WebSphere platform. IBM has offered Web services long before the Web
services moniker was coined, using its Tivoli product to interconnect
corporate divisions.
Both are giving out their services in order to get a toehold in the IBM
market: HP is providing BEA’s WebLogic Server 7.0 free-of-charge for six
months on the HP-UX 11i, while Microsoft customers can download its data
collector for free and pay $1 for the data processor, in order to help
convince Lotus customers to migrate away from IBM.
For the time being, it seems IBM has taken the lead in Web services and
security using its Tivoli product. Last week, the company announced it
would incorporate
WS-Security standards on its platform for customers using any number of
security practices by the end of the year, something the competition has
yet to announce.
