HP, Yahoo Deliver E-Services Portal
HP, building on an alliance with Yahoo announced last August, has introduced the HP E-Services Portal—a Corporate Yahoo! customized enterprise information portal (EIP) service. The new portal service allows corporations to build customized hubs that give employees access to corporate e-services through the look and feel of the My Yahoo! interface. HP will offer the E-Service Portal on a per-user license and subscription fee basis by the end of this month.
HP, touting the E-Services Portal as "the first major offering between two industry leaders that is taking a services-based approach," will serve as a "one-stop shop for design, delivery and integration support." HP is integrating its own technology as well as partner solutions into the portal service. The portal will boast e-speak, the language HP developed to enable dynamic brokering of e-services, as well as portal behavior-based profiling and personalization technology, and enterprise application interface technology.
The idea behind the portal service—and HP's EIP portal strategy in general—is to offer solutions that eliminate or decrease corporations' time and cost in deploying information solutions, and thus allow them to concentrate on building and deploying the applications that meet critical business needs. The E-Services Portal falls in line with this strategy. It offers businesses an alternative to building and deploying their own solutions. They can use the service to offer employees access to external and internal content and services tailored to specific employee needs, function and level, and delivered through a personalized interface. And they do not have to invest heavily—charges are levied on a pay-as-you-go, or usage basis.
To offer the E-Services Portal, HP is partnering with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and Autonomy, Inc. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young will provide integration services to offer customers a personalized, custom-integrated implementation. Autonomy will provide its Portal-in-a-Box suite of products, which automate search tasks and provide customized information.
HP is also offering a new software suite, HP Portal Director, to go along with the E-Services Portal. HP Portal Director enables companywide network searches of Web or FTP servers for existing knowledge sources, such as HTML files or Word documents.
To further expand choice, HP is offering portal customers the chance to add e-services from HP partners through the HP E-services Portal Partner Program. That program allows corporations to choose the specific e-services they need. For example, one partner in the program, Captura, provides an e-service that automates the employee expense-reimbursement process by integrating with a corporation's back office. Another partner, Zimba, offers mProductivity, an application that provides mobile workers with access to enterprise data and applications via voice recognition, wireless devices and the Web.