In a brief statement on Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard (HP) confirmed that it has decided to "stop actively selling" its Neoview data warehousing platform, even though its support for the product will continue till 2014.

The statement implies that the 2007-launched Neoview - which was essentially introduced as HP's core offering in the business intelligence (BI) arena - has officially been consigned to history. The integrated hardware and software appliance was launched in great flourish during Mark Hurd's tenure as the CEO of HP.

In its statement pertaining to the somewhat anticipated discontinuation of Neoview, HP said: "Our customers are demanding options for addressing an emerging set of requirements around the explosive growth of data, new types of information, new classes of analytics and new delivery models."

About the lackluster sales of HP's Neoview, Mark Smith, CEO and Executive VP of research for Ventana Research, told eWEEK that even though HP had invested in sales, its marketing was rather poor, and the product also faced other issues involving scalability and security.

While rumors about Neoview's impending death had been circulating for some time; the speculation heightened of late, after HP and Microsoft announced several converged application appliances on January 19. These products included a $2-million appliance featuring Microsoft's parallel data warehouse (PDW) edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, and a business data warehouse product for small- and medium-size businesses.