Why HP Still Believes In Unix

A decade ago, Intel was shipping the Pentium II processor and Linux was a fringe operating system used by a few Internet fanatics. No one at the time would ever have thought the two in combination would be a match for Sun’s SPARC/Solaris combination, HP’s PA-RISC/HP-UX, IBM’s POWER/AIX or SGI’s MIPS/IRIX.

Funny what a decade can do.

Even though there has been a big shift in the marketplace, high-end Unix has not curled up and died thanks to the advent of Windows and Linux Server. IDC puts the market at around $19 billion annually with single-digit annual growth, and the market is split almost evenly between Sun, HP and IBM.

“The market’s at $19 billion. That’s still good money if you can get 30 percent of that,” said Brian Cox, director of software marketing and planning in HP’s business critical systems division.

HP gave up on its proprietary RISC processor, abandoning PA-RISC in favor of Intel’s Itanium processor, but HP-UX is here to stay. The company is reiterating its commitment to HP-UX as the high-end operating system for its most mission-critical customers and it wants them to know there is a long-term promise of the operating system.

“We want to be able to have customers buy HP-UX today with the full confidence that two decades from now they can continue to run HP-UX for all their mission-critical deployments,” Cox told InternetNews.com.

“When you sell into a bank or stock exchange, they don’t rip and replace that stuff every couple of years. What’s paramount to them is the stability and reliability of that deployment. They keep it for 10 years,” he added.

HP-UX is currently on its 11th major release, which came a decade ago. However, HP-UX 11i has been updated constantly since then. It’s currently on what the company calls Version 3, with Version 4 due in three years and Version 5 planned for three years after that. In addition, the company does minor updates every six months to update the kernel and add new features.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020