Starting in November of 1997, I was consulting at Hewlett-Packard's server sales division to help glue together a bunch of their web sites and apparently we did some fairly pioneering work that influenced BEA Systems/Weblogic and Broadvision. Although I didn't later look over my shoulder enough to really notice what those guys had done, I know I did have a meeting with BEA Systems early in 1998 (possibly January but no later than March) in the second-floor southwest corner conference room of Building 24 of the HP Cupertino complex, where I described what we had done to create an adhesive toolset (written in Perl) to glue together HP's web sites with demand-driven, single login (secure session transfers) mediated by authentication servers, application data replication between application servers and other features that are mentioned in a communique below from my report at Hewlett-Packard, Joe Ellsworth. The reason I described these features to BEA Systems then is because we wanted to get into a set of libraries that someone else was maintaining so we could focus on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in the ESN (Enterprise Solutions Now) project -- and we were hoping they had these features. Furthermore, HP was then looking into an investment (or purchase) of BEA Systems and wanted to know if they had the features HP needed for HP's web-based CRM system.

I don't know when BEA/Weblogic/Broadvision started providing these features, but I know they didn't have them early in 1998 when we told them about the toolset we'd created at HP for these purposes: 

From: joe@pybiz.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 9:03 PM
To: Jim Bowery
Subject: Something you may want to add.

I know that is not as impressive as some of the other things you did but
while at HP you where instrumental in pioneering a vision of secure extranet
portals with advanced features such as workflow driven user profiling,
personalized user interfaces, variable sized user profiles to name a few.
I may have led this team but you where a critical component of the success
and our late night discussions quite often inspired my best ideas.     These
concepts turned back around and eventually  brought BroadVision and several
others to billion dollar markets and in many ways they still have not caught
up.    This will become even more important in the next generation of mobile
centric secure portals because it is likely that these techniques that we
pioneered will enable a more level playing field for services providers in
the emerging internet.  It doesn't get us off the planet but is can  move us
away from decision making processes dominated by large marketing budgets
which is a move in the right direction where rationality rather than middle
management politics can influence business decisions.

Keeping in mind how Plato died I would think that you would want to brag
about anything that can improve rationality in the decision making
processes.


I think it is at least worth mentioning.






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