HP dabbles with Unix after being dazzled by NT

Hewlett Packard has admitted it got caught up in the NT hype and allowed focus on its Unix business to drift last year.

Despite Hewlett Packard signing an alliance with Microsoft to integrate NT and Unix products and services early in 1997, during the last three months the hardware manufacturer has re-appeared as a Unix evangelist, according to analysts and competitors.

Mark Hudson, product marketing manager for the internet and applications server division at HP, said: 'Yes, I think we did lose perspective - some people at Hewlett Packard jumped on the NT bandwagon. The Unix side of the business looked at the announcement with Microsoft made on March 19 last year and felt very concerned.'

Hudson said the manufacturer realised its mistake a few months later because the announcement had come across to many observers and customers as Hewlett Packard distancing itself from Unix.

'Of course, we weren't moving away from Unix - it is a $10 billion business for us,' he commented.

'We are now being more aggressive and will be even more so. The approach of the company has been revitalised. The Unix business is here to stay.'

This month, Hewlett Packard reorganised enterprise systems into two Unix divisions: High Performance Systems (HPSD) to focus on the data centre; and IASD to target internet service providers and enterprise resource planning applications.

Robert Youngjohns, UK managing director of Sun Microsystems, said he had seen a significant refocus from Hewlett Packard on the Unix market in recent months.

'Hewlett Packard has seen the same issue as we did (about Windows NT) - in order to succeed you have to succeed with your own technology. It has spent a lot of money recently on convincing the world about Unix,' he said.