“Builders of next generation portals will focus on providing functions that give them competitive advantage.

–David
Triggs, Program Director,

E-Services Solutions, Asia-Pacific, Hewlett-Packard

Along with the availability of applications on tap, next generation portals and
dynamic brokering are the main business trends which Hewlett-Packard (HP) sees as the world moves toward an e-services economy. And David Triggs is the man behind HP’s e-services business in Asia-Pacific as Program Director, E-services Solutions. Triggs speaks to DATAQUEST on what these next generation portals will look like and how HP will use dynamic brokering for competitive advantage. Excerpts:

What are next generation portals?

The key to the success of today’s web is that the web browser provides a standard interface–HTML or HTTP–to any website. As we try to build portals, say, a travel portal, we need to bring together different services like airline booking, hotel booking, but there are no standards to help us do this. Next generation portals will not only be built around standard interfaces between services allowing one website to talk to another, they will also support dynamic business relationships which will be important for maintaining competitive advantage in the future.



How different will these be from the current model of portals?

If we look at today’s successful internet destinations such as Amazon.com, they have to build most of their offerings themselves, and when they link services from another provider, such as a shipping service, they tend to do this in proprietary ways. This type of approach takes a lot of time and resource to build, and makes it difficult to change business partners. Builders of next generation portals will focus much more on providing functions that give them competitive advantage, and simply plug in services from other businesses for most of the rest.

Because the interfaces will be easier and cheaper to build, portals will offer interfaces to more services, offering their customers greater choice.



Can you point out specific advantages to service providers as well as customers of the next generation or e-services enabled portals?

Today, the cost of building links to suppliers tends to lock a business. As these interfaces become cheaper and faster to build, businesses will benefit from lower costs and faster time to market for new interfaces. They will also be able to take advantage of suppliers who offer lower costs or have better offerings, more easily. In the competitive internet market, these advantages will soon be passed on to customers in the form of more competitive offerings, but customers will also have greater choice through the larger range of services that can be integrated into portals. 



What are the main developments, in terms of infrastructure and technology needed for the establishment of next generation portals?

The key enabler for next generation portals is the standard interface which I have been talking about. This will need to be somewhat different from any of our current internet technologies. With something like 6,500 websites going live on the internet every hour, this interface needs to have scalability, and be able to cope with locating and establishing connections to e-services as soon as they come online. This represents a significant advance over current search engines which, it is estimated, are only able to catalog less than 20% of the internet, and even then their information is often days out of date.

In addition, people quickly develop high expectations of technology as it becomes pervasive, and the internet is becoming pervasive. Think, when you pick up a telephone, how long do you wait for a dial tone before deciding the handset is not connected or is broken. You expect the telephone service to be able to respond with a dial tone in about half a second, and you never expect the service to be unavailable. So we need not only ensure that these services are always available, but also that they offer consistently good performance. 



When can one expect to see such portals on the web?

Many portals are already starting to be built this way, like connecting to external shipping services, although without the industry standard interfaces. We expect to see a few portals based on the e-speak interfaces in 2000, but it will probably take another year or two for many major portals to be built this way. 



On a global perspective, is HP working with other technology vendors in this area?

HP is working with many well known companies to integrate e-speak into their solutions. For example, HP and Oracle Corp have announced an alliance to jointly create leading technology for the development and deployment of e-services.

HP and BEA Systems Inc have formed a broad alliance as part of HP’s
e-services initiative. Yahoo! Inc and HP have partnered in order to help corporations build customized employee hubs that provide access to corporate e-services through the authentic look and feel of the Corporate My Yahoo! interface.

The first implementation of HP’s brokering technology will be in Finland where Helsinki Telephone Corp and its subsidiary Comptel are working to develop controllable and secure distribution methods for multimedia materials in information networks.

To accelerate working with other companies in this area, HP will be running a series of e-services developer’s conferences worldwide, along with several of the partners I mentioned earlier. With the level of interest our e-services initiatives have received here, half of these conferences will be held in the Asia-Pacific region. 

A DQ Report