HP, Everypath Ally on Mobile E-Services
HP and Everypath Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based mobile ASP, have forged a partnership to co-develop and co-market a new wireless Net service that allows companies to deliver personalized e-services to mobile workers. The new service will let users of mobile devices, such as smart phones and Palm Inc.'s Palm VII organizer, connect at any time to the Web services most important to them—e-banking, stock trading, online auctions, and so on. The service also enables users to conduct e-commerce transactions from their devices.
The wireless e-services solution will be provided by HP, which will integrate Everypath technology into a hosting environment that features HP's UNIX and Windows NT hardware along with HP network management services and firewall and intrusion protection software. The Everypath technology eliminates the need to reprogram existing sites in order to provide wireless access and enables mobile users to perform secure transactions in real time. HP and Everypath also are working on an e-speak adapter to Everypath's Rendering Tool to accelerate the process for creating e-speak applications for mobile devices.
In fact, e-speak, HP's brokering technology for creating e-services "on-the-fly," is playing a big role in the new service. To understand what e-speak brings to the table, take, for example, a user who accesses a financial service built with e-speak. That financial service could communicate with a mortgage service to automatically update the user's balances and fees, then recalculate other information based on changes in different accounts, and, finally, display the results on a mobile device. Or a new user might book an airline ticket with a Palm VII, and upon confirmation, initiate a personalized e-service that would effortlessly link with Web services from hotels, car rental agencies and other travel service providers.
The new wireless offering, which gives mobile users what one analyst calls "a surgical strike into the Web," brings together technologies and markets HP is targeting: the mobile wireless market and the e-speak enabled e-services market. Responding to the increasing popularity of Internet-enabled mobile phones and handheld devices, HP last February unveiled a new mobile e-services platform that supports wireless and conventional Internet commerce. The platform enables customers to conduct transactions, from anywhere, at anytime, using any type of communications device. HP is also encouraging widespread acceptance of its e-speak technology. It has open-sourced the technology and is building partnerships with a variety of ISVs in order to get it embedded in applications.