Hitachi Ltd’s agreement for Hewlett-Packard Co to market its ES/Kernel2 expert system building tool (CI No 1,891) is with the Cupertino company’s UK subsidiary Hewlett-Packard Ltd: the product is being repackaged as Object IQ and offered on Hewlett-Packard’s HP 9000 series workstations: Hitachi claims that ES/Kernel has the largest market share of any expert system tool in the Japanese market, and it is also attracting attention as a Rapid Application Development tool; the implementation of Object IQ for Hewlett-Packard’s Precision Architecture was completed in February, uses OSF/Motif as a graphical user interface and it can link with the relational databases from Oracle Corp, Sybase Inc, Informix Software Inc and Ingres Corp.
