(March 25, 2002) -The furor surrounding the $20 billion merger with Compaq has distracted attention from one of the more interesting developments in Hewlett Packard’s recent software activities, namely its entry into the increasingly competitive and crowded Web services battleground.

Realizing that most IT users aren’t starting from scratch but are trying to integrate their existing systems and software with new ones, HP sensed early that emerging Web services standards would be the key to lowering the costs of integrating such heterogeneous systems. It became the pioneer of “e-Speak,” the project led by the charismatic Rajiv Gupta. But the platform that it is bringing to this week’s Java extravaganza in San Francisco, JavaOne--called simply the HP Web Services Platform 2.0--is already the next generation of Web services that began with e-Speak.

HP Web Services Platform is a software infrastructure for developing and deploying “loosely coupled” Web services. These can be any mixture of internal and external services and may include applications, business processes, computing resources, or information stores. The platform--which carries forward the best concepts from HP e-Speak technology--is extremely flexible in that it’s designed to help users complete tasks, solve problems, or perform transactions. And it is standards compliant, making it broadly accessible. Companies can also create secure private “ecosystems” to serve a more controlled community, such as a supply chain, using the HP Web Services Registry

HP’s aim is to provide developers with a consistent approach for creating Web services from existing Java classes, EJBs, and Cocoon applications. HP Web Services Platform 2.0 accordingly is a “plug-and-play” platform that enables interoperability across a range of messaging profiles, from RNIF to Biztalk and ebXML.

Web services fits the overall HP Internet strategy like a glove, which revolves around creating and delivering services over the Net, facilitating “always-on e-business.” Any asset can be turned into a service for delivery over the Net to create revenue, drive profit, and generate efficiency.

HP last month aligned itself with IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, BEA, and SAP (among others) as a founding member of the Web Services Interoperability Consortium--which aims to champion the rapid emergence of standards that will allow each company’s Web services products to “speak” to the other's...one of the goals of Rajiv Gupta’s e-Speak all along.