Hewlett-Packard Co has partnered with WebLogic to market a Java application server, called Tengah, which is designed to deploy business applications on very large scale networks. The partnership is being sold as an effective combination of brains and brawn. We are a small entrepreneurial firm leading these technological developments, explains WebLogic’s VP of marketing Scott Dietzen. HP will help users clarify their choices in a fiercely competitive and contested space. Dietzen identifies Tengah’s three main rivals for the Java application server market as NetDynamics, SilverStream and Kiva, now Netscape Application Server. He claims Tengah has three advantages over its rivals. One is investment protection. The Java industry has collectively standardized on application programming interfaces (APIs) to make sure systems interoperate well. Dietzen claims WebLogic is the leader in supporting those standards. The company says its second advantage is a focus on the application server itself. Tengah works with application development tools from Symantec, Borland/Inprise and Microsoft, whereas NetDynamics and SilverStream are pushing tools of their own. In their defense they started out in Java before standardization became the key to the Java industry, Dietzen says. In the C++ world, this was just the way things were. Tengah’s third advantage, he says, lies in the most basic things. It’s scalable, fault tolerant and secure, has clustering for failover and a rich graphical console. With Hewlett- Packard’s marketing muscle behind it, Tengah may yet find a volume market.
