HP Buys Bristol for Middleware, Gets Wind/U Emulator

Published: February 8, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard this week said that it had paid an undisclosed sum to buy middleware and emulation software company Bristol Technology. While HP said in its announcement that the deal would allow companies to extend the management capabilities of its formerly OpenView and now Mercury stack of systems management and transaction monitoring systems out to mainframes through a product called TransactionVision, HP is also getting its hands on something else: Wind/U.

The Wind/U product, of course allows Windows applications to run on Linux and Unix platforms, which might be something that HP can wield against its competitors and, with the acquisition, can keep out of their hands. Wind/U 6.0 allows 32-bit Windows applications to run on PA-RISC and Itanium variants of HP-UX 11i (and their aCC compilers), and similarly allows Windows applications to run on Solaris 9 (with the Sun Studio 8 compilers). Windows apps are also supported on Linux, specifically on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and the gcc 3.2 compilers.

HP may do nothing at all with the Wind/U software, choosing to sit on it and keep it out of enemy hands. Considering that the software does not support 64-bit Windows applications--and won't unless Microsoft and HP work together to make that happen--HP may do just that.

In the meantime, TransactionVision spans the gamut of transaction processing systems, and can peer non-intrusively into the goings on inside Unix, mainframe, Windows, Linux, and i5/OS-OS/400 platforms. Having kept an eye on these systems, it uses XML and a Web services framework to display what on earth is going on inside these transaction systems.

Bristol is, of course, one of the few companies to take on Microsoft in the courts over damaging licensing practices and to walk out a winner. Bristol was one of a few licensees of something that Microsoft called the Windows Interface Source Environment, or WISE, which was launched with Windows NT back in the mid-1990s. (Microsoft was pitching a co-existence strategy with Unix back them, hoping that companies would use Windows applications on Unix boxes.) When Microsoft raised the price of the WISE source code license, Bristol sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds in August 1998, lost most of the lawsuit with Microsoft in July 1999, but received punitive damages of $1 million in August 2000 by the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, the state where Bristol is based. Or was until HP just bought it.

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