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HP Launches Services Marketplace: "One-stop Shop" Helps Telecom Operators Speed Delivery of New Services

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 27, 2005 - HP today announced an industry-first innovation to help telecom operators meet the growing customer demand for personalized wireless and wireline services.

The new HP Services Marketplace provides a complete environment where operators can broaden their portfolios of services to address the individual business needs and personal lifestyles of their customers.

In the Services Marketplace, operators can analyze business and market needs, work with a large community of developers to explore creative new services, test and demo services in real-world pilot programs.

If the pilots are successful, operators can then actually deploy them in the network with the option of using the HP Service Delivery Platform (HP SDP), which enables the rapid creation and delivery of services across multiple network types.

HP Services Marketplace helps operators reduce cost, risk and time-to-revenue

The HP Services Marketplace delivers key advantages to both operators and the community of independent software vendors (ISVs), developers and content providers.

Operators, who need a steady flow of innovative services, gain access to a wide range of tested, ready-to-launch services that they can explore, analyze, test and deploy very quickly. Since the HP Services Marketplace is fundamentally modular and standards-based, operators can deploy new services using HP OpenCall communications software to leverage the existing network infrastructure or they can deploy the new services within a more comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA), such as the HP SDP. Either way, operators have the advantage of leverage existing assets.

Overall, the HP Services Marketplace approach can help shorten operators' time to revenue – and significantly reduce cost and risk.

For ISVs, the HP Services Marketplace provides valuable exposure to potential customers and the opportunity to significantly increase revenue. Also, that revenue can be more quickly realized since the pre-tested application is ready to launch and can be "turned on" very quickly by an operator. ISVs, many of whom have experience in the HP OpenCall software community, can also take advantage of the creative ferment in the HP Services Marketplace. With access to hundreds of services and other content, experienced ISVs can enhance their own services or compose new composite services.

In many cases, services can take advantage of HP software such as HP OpenCall and HP OpenView.

"The HP Services Marketplace is an exciting place where innovation can lead directly to revenue generation," said Marco Limena, vice president, Network and Service Provider Business, HP. "Building on the strength of OpenCall communications software, the HP Services Marketplace brings operators and developers of all kinds together, where they can take advantage of HP expertise and facilities – and expedite new services all the way through to final deployment and mutual commercial success."

HP Services Marketplace: analyze, explore, test, deploy

The analysis phase of HP Services Marketplace is supported by an end-user services consulting program. HP examines the operator's business needs as well as its current service offerings and how they are segmented and delivered. A gap analysis then compares the operator's offerings to those of competitors and global market leaders. Finally, HP identifies new services that can fill the gaps and creates a complete strategic services roadmap to do so, including delivery and management advice.

"The HP team is helping us take a hard look at innovative services," said Carlos Celaya, director, New Services Business Development, Amena, one of Spain's leading mobile operators. "In this regard, the HP Services Marketplace initiative is the right approach to help us continue to enhance our portfolio of services to meet customer demand."

The exploration phase of HP Services Marketplace allows operators to investigate a wide selection of services from an innovative community of developers, ISVs and content providers who can help operators turn the latest trends into revenue-generating services. Operators can easily search a segmented menu of services and explore hundreds of services that are all certified and integrated for rapid deployment.

This community of ISVs is enhanced by many HP partners such as Appium, Macromedia and Ubiquity that bring key service-enabling technologies – and their own large communities of ISVs. Macromedia, for example, brings more than a million developers who can create rich Flash-based user interfaces for services as part of the HP SDP.

"We are proud to play an important role in HP's Services Marketplace," said Ian Mclaren, chief executive officer, Ubiquity Software Corporation. "With our programmable SIP Application Server integrated into HP's SDP, we are working closely together to bring a host of developers and innovative applications to mobile operators globally."

After selecting promising services, operators enter the testing phase of HP Services Marketplace, where they can conduct full market acceptance tests and prepare the successful services for deployment.

Finally, in the deployment phase, the HP SDP is available to help operators speed the availability of the new services to their customers.

The HP SDP is an SOA that speeds the creation and delivery of services across multiple network types – fixed, broadband, and mobile – and across multiple network generations – 2G, 2.5G, 3G and the emerging IMS (Internet Protocol multimedia subsystem). With an SOA approach, the HP SDP simplifies programming for non-telecom ISVs, protects the operator network and, ultimately, accelerates service creation and delivery by automating the complex links into the network.

Throughout the process, HP, with 25 years of experience building telecom network infrastructure, provides operators with valuable consulting and integration services.

About HP HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $85.2 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2005/050927a.html