Hewlett-Packard Wins $4 Million Portal Contract

Hewlett-Packard Co. has won a five-year, $4 million contract to develop and deploy an enterprise information portal for the Coast Guard.


The Coast Guard is consolidating the information published by its various offices on numerous Web sites run by more than 600 different Web masters. The new site, called Homeport, will be a portal for the Coast Guard's 80,000 employees and volunteers throughout the country, on units at sea and in foreign countries.

Subsets of the information found on Homeport will be made available in the future via extranet or Internet sites to other government agencies and the general public.


The portal will provide "an efficient, well-organized, central source of information to its employees, partners and customers," said Nathaniel Heiner, chief knowledge officer for the Coast Guard.


BroadVision Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., will provide the software infrastructure for Homeport with its InfoExchange Portal and One-to-One Publishing suites.


Hewlett-Packard and Broadvision will perform the work under a blanket purchase agreement with the Coast Guard.


Bruce Klein, general manager of federal sales for the Hewlett-Packard Public Sector Organization, said the Coast Guard can benefit from substantial savings by implementing Homeport and reducing the personnel required to support the broad array of existing Web sites.


Hewlett-Packard undertook a similar consolidation of its own Web sites and saved $50 million over previous costs, Klein said.


The Coast Guard project demonstrates that HP is much more than a product company, Klein said. "We're a technology solution company," he said.


Hewlett-Packard, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has 88,500 employees and reported revenue of $48.8 billion and earnings of $3.7 billion in 2000.