e-speaking the same kind of BizTalk

By Paul Montgomery

If software applications from different departments of different companies have to talk to each other, they need to speak the same language. Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have used this phraseology to name their new free proprietary languages for integrating disparate applications: e-speak and BizTalk, respectively.

HP says e-speak is an open, standards-based platform for the creation, composition, mediation, management, and access of Internet-based services, allowing spontaneous, ad hoc, and secure interactions across firewalls without pre-negotiated names and standards. The objective is to enable companies to ignore lengthy integration development projects in favour of an "on the fly" approach. As part of the "E-services" initiative, e-speak is part of a larger infrastructure for streamlining the buying process through use of intelligent agents which can step across platforms.

Microsoft pitches BizTalk as an XML framework for application integration and electronic commerce, including a design framework for implementing an XML schema and a set of XML tags used in messages sent between applications. The simplest reason for this is to promote the adoption of XML, according to Microsoft, but through peer review and collaboration on the biztalk.org Web site it is hoped that the resulting XML schemas will become industry standards.

Harvey Sanchez, senior marketing manager for Internet technologies at Microsoft Australia said BizTalk would require the involvement of a raft of partners across many software industries.

"It is about setting up a framework to exchange data between applications," he said. "This will be a collaborative effort, and we are only a bit player in that effort."

In a sector where even XML has not been adopted consistently enough to be considered standard, these two technologies are ambitious, in as much as they form part of the backbone of their companies' e-commerce strategies. In evaluating their potential, questions have to be asked by users about interoperability, and their relative worth, despite the fact that both are free.

Ali Al-Tarafi, national sales and marketing manager for software business for HP, said the two languages were complementary and used for different purposes, and claimed Microsoft was helping HP implement e-speak already. He said Microsoft was more of a "facilitator" of Internet services than an integrator.

"Microsoft is focussed on NT. [e-speak] is multi-platform, multi-vendor thing, which any vendor like Sun or IBM can integrate free of charge," he said.

However, Microsoft previewed a new technology in May that goes even further than BizTalk, codenamed "Babylon", which it said would "seamlessly integrate" Windows applications with those running on mainframe, AS/400, Unix and other platforms.