Hewlett-Packard Co. Monday announced plans to invest
$35 million over the next three-and-a-half years in BroadVision Inc., in an e-commerce
and knowledge-management solutions alliance.
The partnership, part of HP’s e-services initiative, is aimed at offering
enterprise customers the ability to deploy a series of advanced,
personalized business-portal solutions. The offerings will include
integrated commerce, marketing and customer-relationship management on Web
sites, e-mail, call centers, PCs, kiosks, mobile phones and personal
digital assistants (PDAs).
In addition, HP said it will resell and support the current BroadVision
One-To-One suite of e-commerce,
financial-services and knowledge-management Internet applications
worldwide, in tandem with certain HP
technologies.
HP/BroadVision solutions will be developed on HP’s new HP 9000 N-Class
Enterprise
Server with the HP-UX 11 operating environment and HP’s WebQoS technology.
HP said these solutions are aimed at enabling enterprise customers to
provide personalized service to customers, suppliers, partners and
employees, and prioritize individual users. Differing from other
business-portal offerings, HP said the products will be pre-configured,
pre-tested complete solutions that run on cross platforms and will save
time, effort and expense of developing e-commerce solutions in-house.
“One of the keys to the new service economy that HP is helping to create is
the notion of e-loyalty, or
customer intimacy via the Web, which is more of a challenge to create
online than in the physical,
face-to-face world,” said Ann Livermore, president and chief executive
officer of HP’s Enterprise
Computing.
“This is one of the reasons for our strategic relationship with
BroadVision. As one of the
pioneers of e-loyalty, BroadVision will be instrumental in helping us
fulfill our goal of leading the next
chapter of the Internet, which we believe will focus on the electronic
linking of personalized services,
delivered instantaneously and automatically over the Web.”
Presently HP is deploying BroadVision solutions throughout several of its
international divisions. Both
companies have also sold e-commerce, financial services and
knowledge-management applications to
their global customers and partners.
“HP’s commitment to BroadVision is an example of technology leaders with a
shared e-services vision
working closely to deliver mature, reliable and complete solutions to our
customers,” said Nigel Ball,
general manager of HP’s e-services division.
“Our customers need an easy, self-sustaining solution that
offers the highest levels of personalized service to their customers and
partners; ties in easily with their
existing IT structure and gets them to market quickly without costly
development, testing and
deployment cycles,” Ball said.
