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To: Feathered Propeller who wrote (61674)	5/19/1999 2:56:00 PM
From: rupert1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

H-P Unveils Partnerships and Software To Create a Market in Internet Services By DAVID P. HAMILTON Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled several partnerships and a software technology dubbed e-speak that helps manage service requests among different Web sites, part of an ambitious effort to position itself as a leader in Internet-based services. Company Profile: Hewlett-Packard * * * Hewlett-Packard Tops Analysts' Expectations (May 17) The announcements, made at a glitzy event on H-P's corporate campus in Palo Alto, Calif., are the latest sign of H-P's intention to challenge dynamic rivals such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. Both have made major pushes to sell the equipment and software needed to run Web sites and offer Internet-based services. In effect, H-P's strategy amounts to an attempt to create a market in what it calls Internet e-services, in part by forming close partnerships with innovative start-ups and by establishing new technology standards that will permit such e-services to flourish. 'Won't Get Rich' H-P's ambitious effort has already impressed some analysts, although it remains unclear exactly how the big computer maker will profit. H-P is pioneering a new business model by trading free computer hardware and software to Internet e-service start-ups in exchange for a slice of their future revenue, but it could take years for H-P to see much of a return. Similarly, H-P plans to give away its e-speak software and its underlying source code in an attempt to turn it into an industry standard, but it probably won't see much profit as a result. "We're not going to get rich on e-speak," H-P's chairman and chief executive officer, Lewis Platt, said in an interview. "It's a thought leader-something that establishes H-P as someone who understands what's going on and can drive the industry forward." E-speak is a software architecture designed to allow electronic services to communicate in a dynamic, automated way with each other over the Internet. That is difficult to do today because there is no standard way for services to recognize each other. For instance, an Internet travel service using e-speak could put out requests for airline tickets, hotel reservations and automobile rentals over the Internet on behalf of a client and let individual Web sites offering such services "bid" for the business automatically. In effect, e-speak could make it as easy for e-services to interact as it now is for Web browsers to display data stored on any Web server, said Rajiv Gupta, H-P's lead architect for the technology. Some of H-P's new partners have already agreed to test e-speak. Finnish bank Okobank Group plans to use it to give customers access to their bank accounts via personal computer and cellular phone. H-P also unveiled several revenue-sharing partners, including ViaLink Co. of Edmond, Okla., which offers retail distributors shared databases to improve the efficiency of their supply chains; and Internet Travel Network Inc., a San Jose, Calif., business-travel service.