HEWLETT-PACKARD CONFIRMED months of rumors this week by abandoning several of its middleware products. By leaving for dead much of the application server stack it acquired from Bluestone for approximately $470 million, HP in effect is also leaving behind its Web services infrastructure leadership ambition.

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Touting internal middleware technology investments and partnerships, systems management titans such as IBM and Computer Associates (CA) are poised to take advantage of HP's abandoned middleware strategy by pushing added functionality across its product lines without additional costs upon users, analysts said.

Not long ago, HP held the potential to be a mighty player in the Web services infrastructure space. In the words of one industry expert requesting not to be named: "First HP invented the Web services boat [with eSpeak], and then they fell out of that very boat."

HP announced on Monday that it will discontinue several middleware products and address that market segment through partnerships with other vendors, including Microsoft and BEA Systems.

HP's Netaction Application Server, Netaction Web Services Platform, and Web Services Registry are being eliminated, HP said. Transition program details will be announced by Sept. 15, according to HP. The company has also stopped developing eSpeak, HP officials confirmed, a technology for connecting networked devices that was once considered ahead of its time.

HP's Netaction product line was created through the company's estimated $470 million acquisition of Bluestone Software in early 2001. But the products gained little traction among customers and HP's software priorities remained elsewhere, according to analysts.

Shawn Willett, a principal analyst at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis, said that HP had a solid opportunity to take a leading role in Web services when it bought Bluestone.

"Bluestone had a pretty good stack. HP just couldn't figure out how to use it," Willett said.

That is not to say that HP is abandoning the notion of Web services altogether. Instead, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company will be relying on partners to provide the Web services infrastructure.

HP wants to be a neutral player in the battle between Java and Microsoft's competing .Net technology, said Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP software. Moving forward, for customers who favor Java, the company will offer systems built primarily around BEA's WebLogic middleware family. For customers who prefer Windows, it will offer Microsoft's .Net products.

"It makes sense to have a more vendor-agnostic strategy and not be heavily weighted toward one stack or another, and that called for a partnering strategy," Denzel said. In addition, she noted, the middleware market is becoming "heavily commoditized."

Analysts have said the strategy poses some risks for HP. Application servers and other middleware have become central to the industry's efforts to link business applications over the Internet, with the goal of streamlining corporate operations and cutting costs. Without any middleware of its own, HP loses an important part of its relationship with its customer, analysts have said.

Current Analysis' Willett added that by discarding its middleware and relying on partners, HP loses an edge in terms of competition. "They will be less of a competitor in all Web services spaces without the middleware offering," he said.

Indeed, Chris O'Connor, IBM Tivoli director of performance and availability solutions, said customers can expect to see the result of Tivoli's harvesting Web services developers from IBM's WebSphere group in an effort to embed software autonomics in its management offerings, beyond simply IBM hardware and tools.

"In this market it's not about creating more technology [for customers], it's about having more at the same prices," O'Connor said. This type of internal company 'horse trading' to where available resources go, some of that's healthy, and if you can leverage that it becomes an advantage being part of a greater software whole."

O'Connor said Tivoli plans to integrate WebSphere's binding and communication capabilities in terms of how it plans to link Tivoli's products together. Specifically, focusing on areas including how objects are identified, mapped, and self-discovered utilizing Web services.

"The server group guys have been out experimenting how to do autonomics on a system. They're starting to look at middleware and software layers. This is an area where we're intersecting -- self healing," said O'Connor.

HP will focus its software development efforts around its OpenView network management portfolio, its Opencall communications suite, and its Utility Data Center software for automating data center operations, the company said.

Yogesh Gupta, CTO of Islandia, N.Y.-based CA, claimed that HP OpenView's static nature over the last few years and deference to cling to its Network Node Manager agent-led approach will hinder its move toward new provisioning methodologies crucial for Web services management.

"The world has evolved from network management to systems management, to manage the entire application stack -- managing what the end-user sees as a service," said Gupta. "If HP's getting in the [ Web services] game now, I think it's a bit late.

For instance, Gupta pointed toward CA's Cleverpath portal as its front end to manage Web services environments by discovering the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) pipeline that exists within an application server as a key advantage a "hardware" company such as HP must overcome to thrive.

CA relies on its partnerships with middleware vendors such BEA and WebMethods as well as the capability to manage IBM's MQseries solutions through CA's Unicenter management framework as cause to flex its middleware muscle in days to come.

In March, HP detailed a pact with Sun to combine OpenView with Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) to form a Web services management platform that automates the event and transaction monitoring, performance, and usage measurement services of HP OpenView across networks, applications, and services.

The obstacle that accompanies HP putting its Web services strategy in the management realm, according to John Meyer, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group, is that the Web services infrastructure providers, IBM specifically, are working to offer end-to-end Web services offerings that include management capabilities similar to what HP will offer.

"IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and BEA are all bundling end-to-end management for Web services too, so customers will want to buy it from them instead of a third-party," Meyer said.

Other experts said that although Web services are important to the futures of Microsoft, Sun, and BEA, HP's success is not as dependant on the Web services stack.

"From HP's perspective, they have bigger fish to fry with the Compaq merger than standard technologies, which is what J2EE application servers are," said Martin LaMonica, an independent analyst based in Arlington, Mass. "Their main priority is finding the products that will stand out. They cannot carry around a lot of dead wood right now."