Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday will unveil its Adaptive Enterprise strategy here at an event scheduled to mark the one-year paper anniversary of the company's merger with Compaq Computer.
Now squarely competing with IBM and its On Demand initiative, HP is bolstering its strategy with a new development toolkit and what's known as the Darwin Reference Architecture.
Speaking prior to the event, Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP's software global business unit, said the company's "focused innovation" is targeted at the systems management and control layer in the enterprise software stack.
Later this year HP will release an as-yet unnamed toolkit based on open-standard APIs to facilitate application interoperability between operating systems such as Solaris and HP-UX, Denzel said.
In addition, Cisco Systems is planning to write a set of APIs for HP's Utility Data Center strategy, she said. The APIs are currently being released to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
HP's Darwin Reference Architecture, scheduled to be announced Tuesday, is designed to extend HP's Web services capabilities, currently being built around OpenView. The reference architecture was named after Charles Darwin's assertion that the most flexible and adaptive survive, Denzel said.
Meanwhile, Denzel said HP is watching the emergence of services-oriented architectures, variously labeled the Enterprise Service Bus or Message Bus.
"Ultimately, the industry will make choices (about the best solution)," she said. The beauty of not owning the whole software stack is that HP will implement the Web services architectures that customers demand.
HP's goal is to build out a federated application environment based on the architectures and tools provided by different companies in the Web services space, she said. The danger which enterprises should avoid is working with smaller Web services vendors that offer their own toolset.
"That approach is fundamentally flawed; it doesn't reach end-to-end," Denzel said.