HP Intro's NewWave Office; Hopes to Take on IBM, DEC
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
NEW YORK (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- Hewlett-Packard this
week became the latest major computer company to unveil an
"office computing" strategy involving heterogeneous hardware and
software environments. HP announced here a family of products,
called NewWave Office, that is built around its Windows-based
NewWave iconic applications environment and uses a client/server
architecture.
 
NewWave Office is a suite of applications for desktop file
management, database access, resource sharing, e-mail, and
network management, all unified under the umbrella of a common
user interface. Like its likely competitors IBM's OfficeVision
and DEC's All-In-1 Phase 2, it is designed to integrate
microcomputer clients with workstation or minicomputer servers
and to distribute applications between them.
 
The differences between NewWave Office and the others, H-P
officials asserted, are that it suppports existing Windows and
character-based DOS applications, runs on normal AT-compatibles
and popular networks such as Novell and 3Com, and does not rely
on "proprietary" server architectures such as DEC's VAX/VMS or
IBM's AS/400. As a result, H-P claimed, NewWave Office protects
customers' current computing investments while providing a
migration path to more capable "open" systems.
 
NewWave Office will eventually be able to run on a mixed network
of micro and minicomputers, including Unix and OS/2-based
systems, HP said. For now, however, the client portion of the
system is available only on DOS/Windows PCs (80286 CPU and
above), while the server component is limited to HP 9000 series
minis running the MPE operating system. By May of 1990, all the
server programs will run under HP-UX, HP's version of Unix for
its 3000 series minis, and most will be available for OS/2, the
company said.
 
At some later point, probably next year, HP plans to support
other Unix systems for the server. On the client side, HP has
long pledged to make the NewWave user interface available for
OS/2 with Presentation Manager and for OSF/Motif; the goal for
their release is now sometime in 1990. There is no plan for a
Macintosh version, though Macs can now access servers through
terminal emulation mode.
 
H-P also announced that NewWave now supports "networked object
sharing," which allows objects to be accessed by multiple users
or applications in a networked environment. This is the first
step in the company's plan to make NewWave a standard for
communication between applications.
 
Pricing for NewWave Office is based on the size of the
installation and/or the types of servers, and ranges from $1300
for a 4-user license to $84,210 for multiserver licenses.
 
 
New Server Applications to Interact with NewWave Clients
Central to Hewlett-Packard's announcement were several new server
applications that will interact with NewWave clients:
 
* Information Access is a database querying tool that lets users
retrieve data from MPE and HP-UX servers running Oracle or HP
SQL; from OS/2 servers running dBASE, R:base, or Lotus 1-2-3; or
from other PCs.
 
* Information Distribution and Exchange is an e-mail capability
for messaging, both within the system via NewWave Desk Manager
and NewWave Open Mail and to other systems via gateways such as
X.400, PROFS, MCI, and Telex.
 
* Resource Sharing lets workgroups share printers, disk drives,
and other peripherals through Novell, 3Com, and LAN Manager
networks.
 
* Networked PC Management lets system operators install and
manage networked PCs from the central server, as well as
distribute software applications to clients and backup clients to
the server.
 
* The company also announced new development tools based on
Windows, PM, LAN Manager, ANSI SQL, and X.400, encapsulation
tools to integrate DOS applications into the NewWave environment,
and a decision-support package called Executive Insight.
 
 
Just What Is NewWave, Anyway?
In short: it's a graphical, icon-based "applications environment"
that (for the time being) works on top of Microsoft Windows and
adds a range of capabilities. As with Windows, using the NewWave
"shell," users can launch applications and swap and link data
between files.
 
Hewlett-Packard has promoted NewWave's object management and
"agent" capabilities. NewWave permits "hot links" between
applications through objects, which contain chunks of data and
remember their source applications. When data is updated in one
application, the changes appear instantly in all other connected
files. Unlike the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) built into Windows,
these NewWave links are invisible and "persistent," H-P says.
 
For non-NewWave programs, agents are like sophisticated keyboard
macro recorders, allowing the user to program a sequence of
commands that are executed automatically. For NewWave-compliant
applications, agents become the means of communication between
objects; they can be triggered by certain commands or timed to
real-world events.
 
NewWave was originally announced 2 years ago and only began
shipping in September of this year. It requires a minimum of 3
megabytes of expanded memory and 8 megabytes of disk space. At
present, there are no shipping NewWave-specific applications that
can take full advantage of its object management and agent
capabilities. But early next year, a dozen programs, including
versions of Samna's Ami Professional and Micrografx Graph Plus,
could be available. H-P claims that more than 60 developers are
working on NewWave-specific applications.
 
Contact: Hewlett-Packard, PO Box 10301, Palo Alto, CA 94303-0890;
(415) 857-1501.
 
                              --- Andy Reinhardt
 
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