News release

HP Announces Software, Services, Collaboration with BEA to Simplify, Speed Adaptive Enterprise Deployments

HP Chief Strategist Shane Robison calls service-oriented architectures a "key stepping stone" to synchronize business and IT; Announces deeper integration of HP OpenView and BEA WebLogic to manage enterprises

HP today announced new software and services as well as the signing of a letter of intent to extend its collaboration with BEA - all of which leverage service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to enable delivery of business and technology services across the Adaptive Enterprise.

During his keynote address at BEA's ninth annual user conference here, HP Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Shane Robison called SOAs a "key stepping stone" that helps enterprises synchronize business and IT - enabling organizations to quickly capitalize on changing processes, information, technologies and competitive demands.

A fundamental enabler of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, SOAs add value by breaking up silos of information, making it easier to reuse shared services, improve interoperability between systems and automate business processes. HP's model for SOAs incorporates newly acquired management software technology and the experience of the company's consulting and integration practice to help customers fully realize SOA benefits -- while simplifying the complexities of designing, deploying and managing SOAs.

Based on this experience, HP announced:

• New "Real-Time Information Director" software that enables real-time visibility and decision-making across company, supplier and partner systems.



• Management software for SOAs, using the HP OpenView Management Integration Platform based in part on HP's Talking Blocks acquisition.



• SOA implementation services, backed by 2,000 HP consulting and integration specialists that have implemented SOAs for more than 500 customers to date.



• A non-binding letter of intent with BEA to integrate HP OpenView management software more deeply throughout BEA's entire WebLogic Enterprise Platform as BEA's management platform of choice. This collaboration is intended to make it easier and more efficient for joint customers to design, deploy and manage SOAs.

"Service-oriented architectures create tremendous opportunity for customers by enabling IT to flex with business needs," said Robison. "HP is leveraging SOAs as a key stepping stone to deliver business and technology services based on business needs - not on the limitations of IT infrastructure. By extending HP's integration with leading SOA platform provider BEA, we can make SOAs easier to design, deploy and manage - providing a faster track to becoming an Adaptive Enterprise."

"By advancing customers' ability to move in a step-by-step manner to an architecture that offers them more choice by enabling them to modularly integrate infrastructure, applications and business process layers," said Tod Nielsen, executive vice president of products and marketing, BEA Systems, Inc. "SOAs offer both a strategic foundation and a roadmap for a more agile and Adaptive Enterprise."

"HP's approach to SOAs leverages the strengths of its deep portfolio of management product and services, and partnerships like BEA," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates. "This model uniquely qualifies HP to build, deploy and manage SOAs that enable customers to increase business flexibility and adapt quickly to changing business needs."

Using SOAs for real-time information delivery

HP's Real-Time Information Director software is based on years of development and more than 30 implementations of HP's Zero Latency Enterprise (ZLE) architecture pioneered by HP's NonStop business. The software uses BEA WebLogic Server to apply business rules in real time, while integrating, cleansing, aggregating and distributing critical business data across company, supplier and partner systems. The new software packages together key technologies to simplify application and data integration, cutting the custom development work typically required for real-time business solutions.

The software is an important component of new Real-Time Business Solutions for supply chain, finance, retail and telecom, all of which are based on the ZLE architecture. The Real-Time Information Director also has been deployed in HP's own supply chain operations to speed execution and provide an enterprise-wide view of supply chain information.

Building an SOA

HP Services offers customers a step-by-step methodology for building an SOA, which helps customers move from a siloed application architecture to a new architecture that incorporates the appropriate elements of SOA and legacy architectures. HP can then help customers use an SOA to expose operational and business metrics, align business demands with IT priorities and optimize heterogeneous environments.

More than 80 percent of HP's 250 enterprise integration customers to date have implemented an SOA using Web services technologies. HP leverages its experience with associated architecture and service management disciplines to build high-performance, highly agile IT solutions for customers, including HP Integrated Service Management and HP Adaptive Application Architecture.

Managing an SOA

Management software adds new value to SOAs by allowing customers to see and manage services across the entire lifecycle, reducing complexity, increasing business agility and lowering costs. By utilizing HP OpenView software to track, model and manage the relationships between key business services, application services and IT infrastructure running on SOA platforms, enterprises can realize reduced costs due to improved availability and overall application performance.

HP has built the HP OpenView Management Integration Platform on top of the technology acquired through its 2003 purchase of Talking Blocks. This technology manages SOAs in their own right, allowing for lifecycle management of services as well as tracking and controlling activities within an SOA, without significantly disrupting the existing layers of technology or integration.

Breadth of solutions, strengthened by partnerships

HP offers a breadth of SOA solutions that are strengthened by its partnerships with leading SOA platform providers, including BEA, and its work to ease integration with other leading independent software vendors.

HP and BEA's non-binding letter of intent provides for HP, a preferred management vendor for BEA, to work with BEA to deliver against a roadmap of joint capabilities and go-to-market initiatives, including broader and deeper integration between HP OpenView and the entire BEA middleware stack.

This is designed to enable joint HP and BEA customers to:

• Improve control and stability of applications running in a BEA environment.



• Maximize returns, by lowering the costs and complexity associated with implementing and managing J2EE/Web services environments in the same context with the rest of the enterprise.



• Increase efficiency, by gaining the ability to reuse shared services, previously developed and deployed.



• Build manageability into custom applications.



• Correlate IT events with business process events and see how changes in one environment are impacting the
other.

In addition, future versions of the HP OpenView Management Integration Platform will further align IT and business by expanding upon the ability to integrate additional management products offered by HP and other independent software vendors who adopt and embrace open standards such as WSDM and WSRF.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2004, HP revenue totaled $76.8 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they never materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the statements regarding the completion, implementation, benefits, and details of the letter of intent, agreement and partnership between BEA and HP; the development efforts, product delivery, roadmap, go-to-market, integration and other goals related to this relationship; and the features and benefits of BEA's and HP's products, any projections of earnings, revenues, or other financial items; any statements of the plans, strategies, and objectives of management for future operations; any statements concerning proposed new services or developments; any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance; statements of belief and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. The risks, uncertainties and assumptions referred to above include the completion of a definitive binding agreement implementing the matters provided for in the letter of intent between BEA and HP; any unforeseen technical difficulties related to the development and optimization BEA's or HP's products; the timing of additional investments of resources by BEA and HP related marketing, joint development and integration activities; changes in the marketplace for enterprise-wide software solutions, including the introduction or increased sales of products competitive with BEA's or HP's products; and any software errors related to BEA's or HP's products or the integration thereof; employee management issues; the timely development, production and acceptance of services and their feature sets; the challenge of managing asset levels, including inventory; the difficulty of keeping expense growth at modest levels while increasing revenues; and other risks that are described from time to time in the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended Jan. 31, 2004, and other Securities and Exchange Commission reports, filed after the Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2003. Readers should also refer to the risk disclosures set forth in BEA's 10-K for the year ended January 31, 2003 as filed with the SEC and subsequent reports filed thereafter by BEA from time-to-time with the SEC. HP and BEA assume no obligation and do not intend to update these forward-looking statements.