(First of two parts)

BANGALORE--For Hewlett-Packard so loved the World Wide Web that it gave its only begotten e-services platform to make e-commerce a reality.

Such could be the summary of Rajiv Gupta's passionate message to journalists and developers as Holy Week draws near in a land where only 2.4 percent of the population are Christians. Still, Gupta believes that, although he has made his journey to Calvary for five years in the course of developing e-speak, he will rise again in three years to see his work bear fruit.

Gupta is chief technologist of e-services and general manager of e-speak at HP. From 1994 to 1998, Gupta started and managed the Future Systems Department focusing on technologies that he believes would drive the next level of Internet innovation. His work became the basis for HP's e-services vision and e-speak technology. Finally, in Dec. 8, 1999, the e-speak engine source code was made available for free to the world at www.e-speak.net, and has since received more than 10,000 requests for download.

E-speak is HP's open software platform for the development of intelligent interaction of electronic services on the Internet. It is an e-commerce language that has a unique architecture that allows it to conduct secure interactions across firewalls without prenegotiated names and standards. HP is thus positioning e-speak as the next logical step to make e-commerce possible in a heterogenous software and hardware environment.

Think of it as Java (from Sun Microsystems) for the e-commerce world. Whereas Sun hoped that Java would liberate users from the barriers of operating system-centric computing, HP hopes that e-speak would be the platform on which developers would create their e-services so that transactions on the Internet would be smoother than they are today.

In an industry where practically every computer company is adopting and branding an Internet strategy (IBM's e-business, Informix's I.economy, Sun's ''.com'' push, Oracle's 8i), HP has chosen to focus its attention on ''e-services.'' This refers to any transactional or information-related service on the Net -- pretty much encompassing everything that's on the Web, including e-commerce. Credit HP marketing for laying claim on the idea.

So if you were to develop an Internet service using e-speak, you have to make use of the free downloadable e-speak engine. You develop your own e-service engine and make that service available on a free trade zone on the Web. From the client side (which doesn't necessarily have to be e-speak-enabled), you go to that free trade zone to look for a registered e-service.

This breaks the traditional client-to-service provider, one-to-one model of getting a product or a service on the Web (e.g., user goes to Amazon.com to search for and buy a book, or move on to Barnesandnoble.com if he doesn't see what he likes in Amazon).

''I am absolutely convinced that the free trade zone will be the future of the Internet economy, whether or not you use e-speak,'' Gupta said.

But what's in it for HP if they're giving away the e-speak source code for free? (What was in it for Sun when they gave away Java for free?) Gupta was honest enough to say that this is not an altruistic endeavor.

''In terms of paying the company back for the investment it has made in developing e-speak, my goal for the year 2000 is to raise $500 million,'' Gupta said. ''$300 million of that has already been guaranteed.''

That amount will come from the savings HP will get since it is now using e-speak internally. It will also come from additional sales from servers, solutions and storage as more of HP's customers use e-speak. That amount will grow exponentially in the next three years, marking Gupta's resurrection after five years of laboring to develop e-speak.

E-speak is open source, but if developers tweak the code, all HP asks is to give back the changes to the community--not to HP--via e-speak service and discussion boards. Sounds like the beginnings of Java to me, where Sun met with the monster of all code tweakers in the form of Microsoft Corp. Sun ended up suing Microsoft for allegedly making Java work optimally in Windows while locking others out--effectively destroying the beauty of Java's cross-platform nature.

On our way to dinner at the garden of the Taj West End, I asked Gupta if a situation analogous to the one Sun and Java encountered may be applied to e-speak.

''Microsoft can and will do whatever it wants,'' he said. ''But they'll be fighting a community of developers instead of HP. I'm confident that won't happen.''

Double hmmm. That's exactly what Scott McNealy said, but while his ''army of Java developers'' were able to get out of the barracks, they never made it out of the foxhole.

Still, you've got to admire Gupta for his passion.

''Skepticism is good. It's healthy. But I'm convinced e-speak will revolutionize the digital economy,'' he said.

E-speak's strength is the use of Java, Wireless Application Protocol, XML and other standards. The focus here is XML. Gupta, and possibly the rest of the industry, believe XML is the way to go. However, sites that are not XML-based have to set up a proxy XML version if they want to use e-speak.

And HP is shifting to high gear in expectation of getting its own army of e-speak developers. It has set up a 24x7 service and support center here in Bangalore--located in the southern part of the Indian peninsula - to accommodate the deluge of developers that will be knocking on HP's doors. Bangalore, HP officials say, is a logical place to set up the center since its software and services industry is growing at an annual rate of 60 percent. Also, every third programmer in the world is Indian.

Well, it also happens that every sixth person in the world is Indian (the country's population has breached the one-billion mark).

Although HP is positioning e-speak to become the ''plumbing'' that will allow a developer to wrap any application written in any language with e-speak service interfaces, aren't there existing technologies that already allow e-commerce to take place? There have been billions of dollars transacted over the Net for the last few years. What edge does e-speak provide to convince people to adopt it instead of maintaining the status quo? Won't e-speak become redundant? Will Madonna's next child look like Dennis Rodman (shudder)?