HP, Ericsson and Telia Cooperate in WAP E-speak E-services Pilot Project - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Nov 15, 1999

Hewlett-Packard Company, Ericsson and Telia will co-operate in a joint pilot project to run Wireless Access Protocol (WAP)-based mobile Internet e-services on HP's e-speak platform.

E-speak is designed to dramatically simplify the creation, delivery and navigation of e-services. HP's e-speak is developed as an open, standards-based platform for the creation, composition, mediation, management and access of Internet-based services. The platform will be available to any device, mobile or wireline.

In the pilot project now underway, Telia will deploy HP's e-speak platform in its mobile network. Ericsson is contributing with its industry-leading WAP solutions, applications development and WAP-enabled terminals.

Following the pilot project, the three companies plan to launch the first of a series of e-speak-enabled wireless e-services, an automated scheduling service and a corporate directory service by mid-year 2000 to a select group of medium-sized engineering firms that maintain fleets of field engineers. Using WAP phones and GSM-based positioning, the field engineers will be able to receive and update customer job information while on the road, as well as access corporate phone and database directories. With the new e-speak-enabled, WAP-based e-services, corporate databases will still remain behind firewalls.

"E-services over the mobile Internet are poised on the brink of a huge growth explosion," said Jan Lindgren, vice president and general manager of Mobile Internet Solutions at Ericsson GSM Systems. "Leveraging its core competencies across a number of important disciplines, Ericsson is an industry leader in developing service enablers and applications. Ericsson's leadership in WAP is but one example. The mobile Internet will be built on open standards to ensure a large, interoperable base of applications and services. As such, Ericsson is pleased to team with HP and Telia in further developing the e-speak universal, open services platform for e-services."

E-speak allows spontaneous, ad hoc and secure interactions across firewalls without pre-negotiated names and standards. E-speak can be developed using practically any programming language and will be distributed at little or no cost to developers via the Internet.

"E-speak is aimed at becoming the foundation from which e-services will operate, dramatically reducing the time, cost and effort required to create, deploy and manage e-services over the Internet," said Rajiv Gupta, general manager of HP's Open Services Operations and lead architect of the e-speak technology. "We expect e-speak to become the lingua franca of e-services over the Web, providing a universal interface that will allow e-services to interoperate dynamically. We think e-speak will do for e-services what the Web did for data.".

Ericsson is the leading provider in the new telecoms world, with communications solutions that combine telecom and datacom technologies with the freedom of mobility for the user. With more than 100,000 employees in 140 countries, Ericsson simplifies communications for its customers -- network operators, service providers, enterprises and consumers -- the world over.

Telia is the leading supplier of telecom-based information services in the Nordic/Baltic region. At the same time, seamless pan-European and global services are being realized through powerful alliances and partnerships in Europe and around the world. Annual turnover for 1998 reached 51 240 MSEK and the number of employees amounted to approximately 30,600.

Hewlett-Packard Company -- a leading global provider of computing and imaging solutions and services for business and home -- is focused on capitalizing on the opportunities of the Internet and the proliferation of electronic services.

HP plans to launch Agilent Technologies as an independent company by mid-calendar 2000. Agilent consists of HP's test and measurement, semiconductor products, chemical analysis and healthcare solutions businesses, and has leading positions in multiple market segments.

HP has 123,500 employees worldwide and had total revenue of $47.1 billion in its 1998 fiscal year. Information about HP, its products and the company's Year 2000 program can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com.