The technology, codenamed Fremont initiative, has been developed in HP's Fremont labs in the Silicon Valley by its open services operations team headed by general manager Rajiv Gupta.

As per HP's roadmap, E-Speak will be available to customers early next year. It has announced a string of tie-ups for joint development of the technology. The most prominent of these could be the one with Microsoft. It is significant because Microsoft has been developing its own similar e-commerce integration technology called BizTalk.

However, top HP executives claimed that E-Speak has no rival, neither in Sun Microsystems, nor in IBM or Microsoft because when released, E-Speak will be a more widely pervasive platform which will enable a vast array of business-to-business solutions by allowing webdevelopers to weave together seemingly different applications to perform complex tasks.

It will act like a common technology platform around which other companies would be free to build their own variants.

E-Speak will be the vehicle for HP's six-month-old e-ambition which will embrace and tremendously impact all its existing businesses, particularly the PC and server segments. Making the announcement, HP's soon-to-retire chairman and chief executive officer Lewis E Platt and other senior executives said here that the company's new e-services battle plan will usher in Internet Chapter 2.

Under the plan, Microsoft and HP will offer pay-as-you-go messaging solutions to small firms and large multinationals. Microsoft will offer its MS Exchange on a subscription basis to large companies that want to outsource their e-mail systems management. HP intends to host the MS Exchange e-mail service and offer it as an attractive alternative to customers wanting a business class messaging environment.

By forgingother significant alliances in different segments, HP intends to build a plethora of e-services ranging from storage and retail software delivery to travel e-services that automatically book tickets and chalk out best itineraries. E-Speak open-services platform includes interface (open APIs), the composition environment tools and pre-built service components.

Gupta felt it will spawn the emergence of a `dynamically brokered' e-services marketplace where requests for various services will be automatically and seamlessly brokered, bid and transacted on the Net upon a netizen's behalf thus fetching him the best deal possible.

"We would like to help people derive an unparalleled value by enabling nimble, modular electronic services that would soon be accessible not just by a personal computer, but virtually any electronic device or appliance such as TV, phone, pager, car, e-mail in-box or anything with a microchip in it," president and CEO of HP's enterprise computing business, Ann Livermore, told TheFinancial Express.

Through this, HP aims to be what Livermore terms as a thought-leader on how the next generation of e-services should evolve, engineer the key underlying technologies and solutions and be the best partner for its customers who want to build their own e-services.