HP teams with BEA to deliver enhanced solutions for enterprise integration

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, May 26, 2003

HP (NYSE:HPQ) has announced offerings with BEA designed to help alleviate the traditional complexities of integrating disparate solutions and applications across an enterprise. BEA WebLogic Server is now available on HP AlphaServer systems running HP OpenVMS and industry-standard HP ProLiant servers running Linux and is expected to be available on HP NonStop servers in June. HP also announced a cooperative support agreement with BEA that provides customers running BEA WebLogic Server on HP platforms with support from either HP or BEA.

With WebLogic Sever running across multiple HP platforms, including Itanium 2-based systems on HP-UX announced in February, HP and BEA customers can more easily and cost-effectively manage IT infrastructures, building on existing assets in open, interoperable environments. Furthermore, with WebLogic Server on NonStop servers and OpenVMS, customers can simplify the deployment and management of critical applications as well as achieve higher levels of availability, data integrity and scalability previously associated with legacy mainframes.

"HP and BEA continue to improve customers' ability to integrate applications in existing IT environments. Today's developments help customers simplify application integration, positioning them to realize a higher return on information technology. In addition, the HP and BEA alliance provides an exciting combination across multiple HP platforms," said Pierre Fricke, executive vice president, D.H. Brown Associates.

"We have seen a shift over the past two years from application development to application integration, a trend that brings tremendous complexity and cost," said Mark Hudson, vice president of marketing, HP Enterprise Storage and Servers. "We are working with BEA to provide interoperable and scalable environments, fundamental for building an adaptive enterprise, that enable customers to easily and cost-effectively move to an integrated environment."

"BEA and HP offer a wide choice of high-performing, industry-standard platforms with the technical expertise to deliver integrated solutions that increase customer productivity and responsiveness while providing uncompromising value and business agility," said John Gray, vice president, worldwide alliances, BEA Systems. "Today's milestones mark continued developments between industry leaders, enabling customers to develop and deploy applications that meet current and long-term IT and business needs."

HP and BEA have created a fast call transfer and problem isolation agreement that is designed to quickly and efficiently resolve joint customer support requests. This agreement establishes a formal support relationship between HP and BEA that outlines call management processes to be used to resolve interoperability concerns on behalf of joint customers. The companies' support organizations work together to isolate the cause to ensure the proper support group addresses the issue, something of particular benefit when the issue is not immediately obvious. This agreement pertains to customers running BEA WLS on the HP NonStop platform. Support for HP servers running HP-UX, OpenVMS, Windows, Tru-64 UNIX and Linux are planned to be available within 90 days.

Expected to be available in June, BEA WebLogic Server on the HP NonStop platform is designed to allow enterprise customers to more easily develop and deploy new applications while still benefiting from NonStop scale and high availability. In addition, customers can integrate new applications with existing software assets in an adaptive, easily managed and cost-effective manner enabling the realization of high-volume transaction processing. These applications will automatically and transparently assume the features of a traditional NonStop application including fault-tolerant software and hardware.

BEA WebLogic Server on HP OpenVMS allows enterprise customers to continue running applications on existing systems while enhancing and developing new application features, all via J2EE functionality. In addition to developing native WLS on OpenVMS applications, OpenVMS customers can also develop new applications on non-OpenVMS platforms and deploy or integrate these applications with their OpenVMS systems. BEA WebLogic Server on the HP OpenVMS platform will ultimately enable customers to seamlessly move applications to the Itanium platform.

BEA WebLogic Server is now available on industry-standard HP ProLiant servers running Linux, with an integrated software suite and optimized to run BEA Weblogic Server. This application server solution offers enterprise customers faster Web-based application deployments, better interoperability and the price to performance advantage of Linux on industry-standard platforms.

HP and BEA have been working together for over five years to provide application infrastructure solutions for the integrated enterprise, establishing themselves as the global leaders in enterprise application integration. BEA and HP's commitment to providing choice and interoperability enables customers to cost-effectively take advantage of the adaptive enterprise.