E-speak
The Technology for Ubiquitous E-services

Alan H. Karp
Chief Scientist, Open Services Operation
Hewlett-Packard

Today, setting up a service to be used over the Internet is difficult, special-case work. Part of the difficulty is that each provider of such a service addresses a common set of problems in a proprietary way. E-speak solves the problems of naming, describing, managing, and controlling access in a manner that makes it easier and safer to allow remote access and to do businesses in heterogeneous environments.

E-speak started as a research project at HP Labs with a very modest goal - to change the way the world thinks about computing. Today, we think about computing as the hardware we buy and the software we install on it. E-speak is about thinking of computing as a set of services that you enlist as you need them.

This dramatic shift is enabled by e-speak, an operating environment for the Internet. Almost, but not quite, an operating system, e-speak provides the access control and virtualization of an operating system while preserving the independent control of machines in the environment.

E-speak is the open-source software platform for creating, composing, mediating, managing, and accessing Internet-based e-services. With e-speak we can more easily build a world of universal e-services that can be accessed intuitively using a wide array of devices and platforms, from personal digital assistants, to PCs, information appliances, and supercomputers. With e-speak these e-services can interact with each other in order to advertise capabilities, discover other e-services, and ally with each other to offer new functionality, even negotiate to broker, bill, manage, and monitor each other - all in a dynamic, platform-independent, ad hoc, yet secure manner.

This talk will describe the requirements that led to the various features of the e-speak architecture as well as its key innovations.