SAN FRANCISCO-Hewlett-Packard and Oracle announced here Tuesday at HP World that they have agreed to jointly create technology for the development and deployment of HP's e-services.
Referred to by Ann Livermore, president and CEO of HP's enterprise business unit as "one of the most critical alliances" for HP's e-services vision, the partnership calls for joint technology development and distribution of e-services - HP's Internet plan for helping broker Internet business-to-business transactions.
Oracle's president and chief operating officer Ray Lane claimed the announcement is the "most important in 100 years," and will help enable a new computing environment in which "the customer is king."
According to Livermore and Lane, HP and Oracle will each invest millions of dollars to establish labs at HP in Cupertino, Calif. and at Oracle in Redwood Shores, Calif. for HP and Oracle engineers to develop e-services technologies.
This effort will focus on integrating e-speak, HP's common API designed to make it easier for disparate e-commerce transactions to be conducted over the Web, and Oracle 8i, Oracle's relational database.
Oracle's database will also be offered as part of the e-services solution HP offers start-ups. Those solutions call for HP to provide the hardware and software to nascent companies in return for a share of future profits from that company's e-service.
In addition, HP and Oracle plan to form "expert centers" worldwide to assist customers in developing e-speak enabled e-services deployed on Oracle 8i. E-services technologies will be made available to Internet application developers and HP's e-speak development community through the Oracle Technology Network and through HP's developer portal.
The deal is exclusive to Oracle, but while HP said it will not make such an arrangement with other database providers, the company also claimed this announcement does nothing to take away from the message of openness it has been trying to portray for the e-speak technology.
According to Livermore, the move is simply a matter of necessity, with HP needing a platform on which to test e-speak and Oracle's 8i database being the ideal candidate for that testing. Other database vendors, namely Microsoft and IBM, are welcome and able to develop e-speak applications if they see fit. However, open source, Livermore pointed out, does not necessarily mean equal opportunity.
"It's one thing to be open source and another to help your competitor," Livermore said. "We're gonna make it available to them, but I'm not eager to help them."
This story from Infoworld.com Copyright © 1999 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
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