HP invests $35 million in BroadVision for portal personalization
Nigel Ball, General Manager of HP's E-Services Division announced that HP will invest $35 million in BroadVision, Inc. (Redwood City, Calif). Extending an already existing partnership with BroadVision, the two companies are planning to elove the portals of today into the e-services of tomorrow.
Dr. Pehong Chen , President, Chairman of the Board, and CEO of BroadVision, who advertises his company as a one-to-one Internet technology provider, says that portals now provide information email and stock quotes are "miles wide and an inch deep. With HP help, he feels portals will also provide corporate data for employees or they will be personalized for each user. In fact, Chen says portals "will become the destination address."
Together the two companies plant to deliver these e-commerce, marketing and customer relationship applications that pre-tested, preconfigured and ready to deploy and could possibly be tied into back-end corporate functions. Ball says the $35 million ivestment number only reflects the cash ammount for R&D and software licensing and other associated costs. He points out that it doesn't include the costs associated with HP's marketing or pre-sales and post-sales technical support.
Also important to note is the fact that BroadVision's application runs on Windows NT, Sun Solaris as well as HP-UX. That's "unlike anything involved with Sun-Netscape acquisition," points out Ball. He also pointed out that BroadVision is "powering the HP Shopping Village," HP's online store. Ball also pointed out another complementary connection with HP's recently upgraded Web QoS, which is a server-based software that provides differentiated services to Web users. Currently, Web QoS runs only on HP-UX, but when asked if there plans to make that software run on other platforms, "we are actively working on that."