At the launch of its new Emerald superservers, Hewlett-Packard Co boasted that over 100 IBM Corp customers had already offloaded or replaced applications from their mainframes over to Hewlett-Packard business systems and servers over the past year, and quoted Dataquest figures that show 46% of mainframes sites surveyed in the process of downsizing. Hewlett-Packard’s software effort for the new servers included endorsement from a veritable who’s who of mainframe software houses, all eager to stand up on the machine and say that their customers were queueing up to leave the IBM mainframe world behind. Computer Associates International Inc, for instance, claimed there was a huge market – you can’t imagine it for its new product, CA-Unicenter, which is currently in beta test on Hewlett-Packard machines. Unicenter is an open systems equivalent to its current mainframe software for data centre management. Oracle Corp’s Larry Ellison claimed that Hewlett was the only company to offer credible, fully-compatible systems at both client and server levels, something that makes the implementation of client-server software a whole lot easier, he said. Dun & Bradstreet Corp’s D&B Software said it was converting its Millennium financial and personnel package, which would be ready by year-end, and in the meantime has a gateway product enabling data access between IBM mainframes and Hewlett-Packard systems. Other software houses committing to the machine included: Lawson Associates Inc, PeopleSoft Inc and SAP AG – financials and personnel; SAS Institute Inc and Pilot Executive Software Inc, Executive Information Systems; Anderson Consulting, Cimcon Inc and SAP again – manufacturing and logistics; CGI SA, Cincom Systems Inc, Information Builders Inc, Softlab GmbH, Software AG and Texas Instruments Inc, databases, application generators and software engineering. Computer Associates, SAS, Pilot Executive, Anderson, Cincom and Texas Instruments are currently only working on HP-UX implementations, the rest also have MPE/IX projects on the go.
