HP Announces Middleware Engineering Partners' Customer Successes; HP DCE/9000 and ENCINA/9000 Help University of Arizona, Ohio State University and The Water Authority of Western Australia Deploy Distributed Client-Server Solutions

Business Wire, Dec 18, 1995

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 18, 1995-- Hewlett-Packard Company, highlighting its leadership with mission-critical distributed computing, today announced three new customer successes as part of its Middleware Engineering Initiative. This initiative provides HP customers with the benefits of distributed client-server solutions built with HP and partner solutions. Using these solutions, customers can develop or migrate to environments consisting of reliable, secure, client-server and fully distributed transaction-processing applications without having to worry about network or operating-system specifics.

University of Arizona (Tucson, Ariz.), Water Authority of Western Australia (Perth, Western Australia), and Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio) each filled different needs with HP and partner solutions.

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA BENEFITS FROM OPEN HORIZON AND HP RELATIONSHIP

Open Horizon, Inc. recently worked with HP to develop the Enterprise Accelerator Program for the HP 9000. The program makes it easy for customers to extend their new or existing client-server applications from a departmental to an enterprise level.

The program includes a 90-day evaluation copy of HP's DCE/9000, Open Horizon's standards-based connectivity product, Connection; 10 copies of PC-DCE for Windows 3.x; full on-site deployment and testing; and one year of maintenance, support and software upgrades. The University of Arizona, a top 25 research and land-grant institution, is using HP 9000 servers, Encina/9000, DCE/9000 and Open Horizon's new Application Broker product to migrate to an application infrastructure for the next century.

"We are using Encina/9000 to build suites of transactions for coordinating student information across Sybase and IDMS databases, and using CICS for transactions running on both UNIX and MVS," said John Detloff, development specialist, principal of Student Information Systems 2000, University of Arizona.

Detloff also noted that their move to three-tier client-server computing on a fairly large scale has, so far, been on track. "We migrated to a DCE/9000 environment with HP 9000 servers for our human-resource application. Our users saw no difference other than that of performance -- the system response with the HP 9000 server and DCE/9000 improved considerably over the older system."

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY GAINS CONTROL OF TRANSACTION PROCESSING

Ohio State University has achieved productivity through real-time access to data, easier application programming and reduced mainframe costs by deploying HP's Encina/9000 and DCE/9000 to manage information.

Ohio State's open infrastructure with HP Encina/9000 managing a Sybase database and applications on HP servers now can communicate with the school's IBM mainframe. This enables on-line access to information and to the university's custom programs, such as parking and traffic. Eventually, Ohio State plans to make student-bio data and general-ledger information readily available as well.

"The prime desire was to get to a distributed environment with control over transaction processing," said Ronald Beaton, director of Administrative Information Services at Ohio State University. "HP's Encina/9000 works in a transition environment, and it allowed us to maintain legacy systems."

ENCINA/9000 AND CICS FOR HP 9000 HELP OPEN WATER AUTHORITY

The Water Authority of Western Australia's information-technology strategy enables mission-critical response and high availability of information. To achieve this, the Water Authority needed access to legacy systems while it migrated to open UNIX(R) system-based platforms.

In the course of that migration, a new architecture with disaster-recovery capability was planned. The Water Authority chose a distributed network solution, using HP 9000 enterprise servers linked via Token Ring. Its choice of HP's distributed on-line transaction-processing products and Oracle's database is part of its open-systems strategy.

Water Authority of Western Australia currently is working on in-house applications, such as its Production Implementation Maintenance System, which uses CICS for HP 9000.

"HP's Encina/9000 and CICS/9000 make it possible for robust, in-house application development and also provide access to legacy systems," said Robert Pugh, planning manager of the Water Authority. "We can develop new CICS/9000 applications that work in the client/server environment as well as with mainframe CICS applications; CICS/9000 is really the right solution. We need that CICS/9000 level of functionality."

HP'S MIDDLEWARE ENGINEERING INITIATIVE

HP's Middleware Engineering Initiative is an ongoing program aimed at speeding up client-server-solution deployment. HP works with more than 100 companies that offer a variety of distributed products and migration, consulting, training and integration services. HP ensures that HP DCE/9000, Encina/9000, high-availability, systems-management, application-development and partner products are integrated and tested with each other to provide customers with a robust and functional distributed-computing infrastructure.