Hewlett-Packard Co has partnered with Oracle Corp in an e- services alliance to combine the Oracle 8i database with its e- speak dynamic brokering language. As we hinted back in May at the original e-speak launch (CI No 3,664), Oracle 8i now becomes the preferred database repository for e-speak.
HP will continue to offer e-speak to companies that want it as open source. But it plans to work together with Oracle to optimize the technology for better performance. The two promise not to go as far as adding undocumented calls. But asked if she would strike a similar relationship with IBM Corp for DB2, Anne Livermore, president and COO of HP’s Enterprise Computing Division said Why should I? Oracle is a partner, not a competitor. I’ll make e-speak available to IBM [as open source] but I’m not very eager to help them. Similar deals with other database companies are possible, but not very likely, HP said, because Oracle is dominant in the marketplace.
The deal covers both development and deployment of e-commerce systems, said Livermore. HP and Oracle plan to make tools available to both the HP Developer Network and to the Oracle Technology Network, around one million developers in all. It will set up development labs in Cupertino and Redwood Shores. And for deployment, the two intend to form expert centers worldwide to assist customers such as internet service providers, application service providers, dot-com companies and end-users to deploy e- speak on Oracle 8i.
HP says e-speak is pitched at a higher, services level than Microsoft’s BizTalk, generally considered as competitive technology. Rajiv Gupta of HP’s Internet Business Unit, and the man driving the e-speak effort, said that BizTalk was positioned at the transport level, and Sun Microsystems Inc’s Jini at the device level, while e-speak was for brokerage and for adding other services. He admitted that some customers would use it for transport and device level work as well, however.
Oracle president and chief operating officer Ray Lane said the deal marked a change in the industry, as software companies shifted their focus from products towards the internet services business. Oracle hasn’t always been so sure. Back in June, CEO Larry Ellison said that he wasn’t expecting the company to go as far as Microsoft and HP towards what used to be called Electronic Data Interchange services. He said then that standards for vertical market EDI were nothing to do with Microsoft and HP and that such specific transactional and information exchange standards will come from the companies exchanging that information, as it always has, historically.
