Last week’s announcement of a joint venture between Hewlett Packard Co and Northern Telecom Ltd on computer-aided telephony and ISDN applications does not worry Northern’s new UK partner ICL, at least not publicly: the Putneysider says it does not see any conflict of interests while Northern Telecom claims that the deals with STC and Hewlett-Packard will concentrate the public and private arenas respectively for ISDN but conceded that there would be some overlap; Northern also confirmed that the non exclusive agreement with Hewlett will initially be aimed at the US market initially but said it could be expanded to cover Europe later.