By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co, once perceived as the non-internet company, has won what appears to be some of the best net cred to date with a deal to be the exclusive supplier of a new Corporate My.Yahoo service. Yahoo said it believes in their [HP’s] broad internet and e-services vision, and says it does not plan to offer the new corporate service through any third parties, at least for the time being.
HP and Yahoo will jointly sell what amounts to personalized corporate employee hubs and intranets and customer and supplier extranets priced on a subscription basis. Initially they’ll carry value-added news and other services relevant to an employee’s function or industry, plus My.Yahoo’s 13 free member services. However that will be built out with higher-priced services that roll into the Corporate My.Yahoo pages such as access to human resources, planning and analysis and other business intelligence tools.
The service will leverage whatever existing My.Yahoo pages employees may have already created. Yahoo observes that 60% of its traffic is already driven from corporate desktops. HP effectively becomes a channel for the new Yahoo service.
