HP Announces ENTRIA Plus Stations, New Advanced Multimedia ENVIZEX Stations for Commercial and Technical UNIX System Customers

Business Wire, Feb 12, 1996

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 12, 1996-- Hewlett-Packard Company today introduced HP ENTRIA Plus, a new low-cost line of X stations offering seamless access to UNIX(R) system, Windows, Internet and legacy applications from a single desktop.

In addition, the company announced an advanced multimedia bundle that provides HP ENVIZEX station users in high-performance multimedia environments with a low-cost solution for running full-motion digital video.

HP ENTRIA Plus and HP ENVIZEX stations are key elements of a new category of desktop devices called "thin" clients and are targeted toward corporate customers. Thin clients leverage the power of corporate networks and the Internet rather than providing local data processing and storage on every desktop. They also address the growing challenge that organizations face in delivering a wide variety of information to the desktop, while reducing costs and simplifying administration. HP ENTRIA Plus and ENVIZEX stations specifically meet these needs of commercial and technical corporate customers.

COMMERCIAL MARKET NEEDS

With this announcement, HP, the worldwide leader in the X station market, is further addressing the needs of its commercial customer base. These customers inhabit mission-critical environments, such as branch banking, retail, financial back-office and customer service, and increasingly are looking for low-cost, networked desktops that can seamlessly access multiple platforms. As these organizations are pressured to reduce their corporate computing costs, they are focusing more and more on reducing the initial client-acquisition costs, as well as the lifecycle costs involved in upgrading, administering and maintaining multiple desktops.

HP ENTRIA PLUS

HP ENTRIA Plus stations are fast, simple to manage, graphical enterprise desktop devices. They are ideal thin clients for professional and office environments where multiplatform, multiwindow application access is required. HP ENTRIA Plus stations deliver access to Windows through the HP 500 Windows Application Server and provide several advantages over networked PCs, including ease of use and centralized desktop administration and maintenance.

Ease of use is attained through several innovative product features: "fast-boot" capability, which allows HP ENTRIA Plus stations to boot in less that 40 seconds, providing a quick "out-of-the-box" experience; Smart Power Down, which enables the station to systematically shut down all host processes when the power is shut off, conserving valuable memory and compute resources; and Smart-Monitor Configuration, which allows the X station to auto-detect the monitor type and resolution and auto-configure itself accordingly, increasing its ease of use.

Centralized administration and maintenance is another key feature offered by HP X stations. Commercial customers can rapidly deploy large numbers of desktops and provide easy centralized hardware and software maintenance. Using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and reprogrammable link-level addresses, system administrators have a streamlined process for maintaining and installing HP ENTRIA Plus stations on a large network with centralized management and plug-and-play functionality.

Available immediately, HP ENTRIA Plus stations replace the current HP ENTRIA products. They deliver a 30 percent performance increase and provide investment protection for the desktop because of their ability to run newer, more graphically demanding applications as these applications become available. Using audio and video (MPEG(1)) functionality, HP ENTRIA Plus stations can be used in multimedia applications in enterprise and Internet environments.

"HP has been very successful with commercial customers by providing them with seamless access to data in heterogeneous, multiplatform environments," said KC Chavda, marketing manager, HP's Panacom Automation Division. "Recent discussions in the press on thin clients has raised awareness of the benefits of network-based clients. As a result, we expect that more customers will deploy HP ENTRIA Plus stations in these environments because they also provide cost advantages, security and administration simplicity over traditional PCs."

TECHNICAL MARKET NEEDS

HP is also clearly positioned to address the needs of its growing technical customer base. Typical customer environments include mechanical and electronic design, software development and geographical information systems (GIS). These customers require additional seats to expand their workstation networks while reducing the overall cost per seat. Specific requirements include high graphics performance, multimedia capabilities and flexible network connectivity.

HP ENVIZEX ADVANCED MULTIMEDIA STATIONS

HP ENVIZEX stations are ideal, low-cost companion seats to workstations in engineering environments. They provide exceptional graphics performance and a wide range of expandability features. These include features such as the industry's only NFS-mounted 3.5-inch floppy drive for use while accessing PC applications on the HP 500 Windows Application Server, CD-quality audio for voice or e-mail annotation and support for local document scanning. HP continues to extend its expandability offerings by delivering full-motion digital video through the MPEG-1 video adapter. MPEG video is the ideal solution for technical customers, offering video playback performance of up to 30 frames per second. Through a user-selectable display-speed setting, customers can set the playback speed to match their own system capabilities and video quality requirements.