The Online REPORTER
WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
November 11 - 15 1996 Issue No 24
HP REVS PRAESIDIUM WEB AUTHORIZATION SERVER
Hewlett-Packard Co will this week unveil the second version of its Praesidium Web-based Authorization Server and a more complete looking package of services and third-party tools.
Authorization Server is the center-piece of HP's Praesidium security strategy, which is derived from its acquisition last year of SecureWare Inc, which developed B1-level security with HP that does not rely on firewalls or encryption.
The new version introduces so-called secure Web pages, so URL and CGI script access to Web sites can be controlled and browser-based administration, plus a bunch of new platforms.
The whole package comprises Authorization Server, an applications security server, smart card technology and VirtualVault Trusted Gateway. The database underneath at the moment is Informix, but HP and Oracle are working on a version of the latter's WebServer.
Tools partners include Netscape, Nortel, Texas Instruments, Antares, Passport and Forte and there's four systems integrators plus HP itself. Authorization Server 2.0 is out December 1 on Windows 3.x, NT 3.51, HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX for between $35,000 and $50,000 per server. www.hp.com
IBM LICENSES JAVAOS FOR NCS AND RESALE ON BOARDS
IBM Corp has licensed the skinny JavaOS operating system from Sun Microsystems Inc's JavaSoft Inc subsidiary for its network computers and will be able re-license to it other vendors under the agreement.
It has also picked up the HotJava browser-based software to develop Java applications, though it would not give any details of those plans last week.
It is evaluating a bunch of other HotJava technologies such as HotJava Views groupware that it may or may not use depending on how its other NC software options turn out, including the Navio client software from the Netscape Communications Corp subsidiary of the same name and the Java- based groupware components the Lotus Notes division is creating. The re-licensing will be done by IBM Microelectronics, which will sell boards running JavaOS to OEM customers.
IBM had been using an operating system written by Network Computing Devices Inc - on its network computer OEMed from NCD - but will now use JavaOS in all its NCs, of which there are three: the NCD-manufactured PowerPC 403-based device, a PowerPC 603e-based reference board and an unnamed Intel Corp-based device, though it's not clear yet whether this will emerge as a board or a fully-fledged machine.
This implies that IBM will port JavaOS to at least PowerPC and Intel instruction sets. IBM will supposedly show all three devices at Comdex this month.
The Java marketing arm of IBM's Internet division is setting up Java Validation Centers in San Mateo, California - which with six staff initially is over the road from JavaSoft - and Waltham, Massachusetts, where developers can test Java work on Sun, HP and IBM equipment, supposedly at no charge. "We're joined at the hip with JavaSoft," IBM believes.
IBM will have Java-enabled all of its operating systems by year-end. It reckons all its top 150 accounts are implementing or will be doing Java. JavaOS is currently up on Sun's Sparc RISC, Nat Semi's NS486SXF-25 and the Mitsubishi/DEC StrongARM implementation.
LOTUS POURS JAVA ALL OVER ITS PRODUCT LINE
IBM Corp's Lotus Development Corp is giving its entire product line a Java makeover, starting with Lotus Domino 4.5 - the next cut of Notes due by the year-end.
With that version, Notes clients will be able to execute Java applets and the Domino server will be able to serve pages that contain Java applets or contain scripting languages such as VBScript or JavaScript, which is slightly different from being a full-blown applet server.
The company also laid out its Java plans for the next full release of Domino, due sometime next year, but this being Internet time, Lotus could not risk waiting until its Lotusphere97 gathering in January to tell everyone, although it did promise more details then.
Lotus VP marketing for Notes and Domino, Tim Dempsey, described the clutch of announcements as the hill Lotus has to climb to stay competitive. Lotus reaffirmed it's commitment to the Object Management Group's Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) and will use IIOP as the way Java classes will access Domino applications. It will make the object store, messaging and other Notes application services available to Java applets. Lotus intends to deliver Java applets that will present a Notes front-end within a browser. The Notes development environment will enable developers to write client-side Java applets.
Meantime, Lotus is busy building a set of tools, which sounds a bit like Office, but is based on JavaSoft's Java Beans component architecture. Lotus already has a set of similar ActiveX controls. The next Notes clients and server will be Notes containers and publishers respectively.
Lotus also said the next Notes client would ship with both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The agreement with both companies stretches to any and all of Lotus' products, and it will decide in time which ones will contain the browsers. www.lotus.com
The race between coverage on the Internet versus the television was closer than the one that mattered, reports Reuter. The first US presidential election since the invention of the Web was a test that the net had trouble keeping up with. The in-depth information was sitting there, but users couldn't get access due to the sheer volume of traffic. And the TV networks were first to call a Clinton victory.
By 8am PST both Bill Clinton's www.cg96.org and Bob Dole's www.dole96.com were both busy, but tellingly that was not the case at Ross Perot's www.perot.org. There was no live news at Perot's site but a plea to "Make History Tuesday," by giving the Reform Party 25% of the vote, thus securing him federal funding on a par with the other two parties. By about
ORACLE SHOWS RISC NCS - KEEPS X86 AND SERVERS HIDDEN
The day began with Scott McNealy's son, Maverick, taking his first public steps before an overcrowded hall of Oracle Corp customers and it ended with CEO Larry Ellison and two dogs named "Nipper and Chipper".
In-between, Oracle gave last week's packed Oracle Open World audience its first real look at the Oracle Network Computer, showcasing a handful of RISC boxes, all based on Acorn Computer Group plc's ARM chip. When the day was over, and the dogs had departed, it seemed that Oracle had left as many questions as answers.
Though Larry Ellison "showed" a 133MHz Pentium NC during his keynote, no more details on the specifications or manufacturers of the Intel NCs were released. Though Oracle spokespeople promise that NC server software has been developed and is ready to be announced, it was not.
Oracle subsidiary Network Computer Inc (NCI) said it did not want to "overwhelm" the media coverage or, possibly, have its announcement compete with last week's election coverage; a pretty thin excuse given that Open World is Oracle's premier international customer event.
THE NETWORK COMPUTER
Of Oracle's 15 original NC manufacturers, five were able to announce details on their machines. In all, seven RISC versions of the NC, from an Acorn reference design centered around its ARM7500FE processor, have now been announced.
Of them, only Acorn and Idea had working NCs targeted at corporate users, though Uniden Corp was there with an empty box it called a wireless NC - expected to be launched at Comdex Fall and shipping in mid- to late 1997. All the others - Thomson Consumer Electronics, Akai, Proton Industrial Electronic Co Ltd, and Funai Electric Co Ltd - are for home use.
Acorn announced four new devices: the Office, ExecPhone, Set-Top-Box NC and the NC TV, though there's no word on when these might appear, or on pricing.
Idea's Internet Client Station, targeted for corporate and educational use, is available now via pilot programs for $650, including server software and limited upgrades. It will eventually sell for $500. Akai Electric Co Ltd's Akai Digital unit will ship its Akai Internet Connection network computer in the first quarter of next year for $350, aimed at home users. Funai's Janesa device will ship next month for less than $500. New to the Oracle NC alliance, Thomson Consumer Electronics will produce a set-top Internet access device for standard televisions that it will sell under the RCA brand-name next Spring for around $300. Thomson Multimedia will introduce a similar device in Europe with Thomson branding. Thomson said it's got plans for other NC devices under the ProScan and GE names.
NetChannel Inc, the television-based Internet content provider, will provide a subscription-based service for the RCA products. The other newcomer is Proton, which will ship its Xavier television set-top box NC to its Taiwanese ISP customers in the Spring of 1997.
The NCs all use smart cards for user authentication. All the vendors were talking about evaluation programs and positive customer response, but nobody had much to say about actual sales, perhaps because NCI hasn't yet announced what kind of servers they're supposed to use.
Sales in the US may prove particularly elusive, since only Thomson and Akai seem to have a strong US presence. Meantime, the NCI subsidiary has licensed Bitstream Inc's Bitstream TrueDoc Character Shape Player to incorporate into it's NC operating system, as well as fonts for various languages from Bitstream and Dynalab.
NC SOFTWARE: HATTRICK
Oracle's answer to Microsoft Office is a front-office suite of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applets for use on Network Computer devices it's calling HatTrick.
Java-based HatTrick applets will be served to NCs connected to the Web-based InterOffice messaging and document management options that run on Oracle's UnivseralServer database. HatTrick is a component of Oracle's Network Computer Architecture vision and will support NCs implementing the NC Reference Profile.
HatTrick enables users to create, e-mail and receive formatted documents without launching separate applications or attaching files. It will be for intranet use initially, but Oracle says the technology is "almost there" for home distribution of a HatTrick-type product. HatTrick applets publish in HTML and require 2Mb RAM and no client disk space. Oracle compares this to Microsoft Office that requires 12Mb RAM and 89Mb client disk space.
HatTrick word processor and presentation graphics applets will ship as part of InterOffice 4.1 next quarter; the spreadsheet applet will ship in the second quarter. A Web version of Oracle's Developer/2000 will ship for NT and Solaris, in the next quarter (OR 22).
WHAT WASN'T ANNOUNCED
Oracle wasn't saying who is going to sell the Oracle NC to its biggest market: businesses in the US or who will be manufacturing the Intel version of the NC. They may well amount to the same thing. The Server is where Oracle will, no doubt, make most of its money out of the NC, but Oracle would only hint at what the NC Server might be. Oracle says NC servers will be sold as a suite of products that will be marketed as turnkey products, with software from NC Inc. Ellison says NC here stands for "no configuration" or "no choice" (sounding a bit like our nemesis here, aren't we, Larry?). They will run on Unix and Windows NT and are expected to be announced in the next two weeks, and shipping by the end of the year.
Oracle isn't saying much more, but Idea, who has been testing its NC's with Oracle server products, says its server package has featured Oracle InterOffice, with a browser front end, HatTrick, some client software and - the key NCI component - authentication software.
NCI has apparently sub-contracted parts of the authentication software from un-named third parties. This latter package would seem to compose a typical intranet turnkey solution, but Oracle has been talking about fancier versions too, for ISPs and large corporations.
NEW ORACLE WEBSERVER AND GIS OPTION
Oracle Corp is offering a new 2.1 cut of its WebServer software which can be used in conjunction with Netscape or Microsoft HTTP servers to deliver database information to browser-based applications.
The new version includes an integrated Java Virtual Machine and support for Java database connectivity. WebServer includes a framework for building cartridges and linking databases with applications. It uses an Oracle Web Request Broker mechanism for performing persistent database transactions over the Web.
WebServer 2.1 for Solaris is out now - an NT version is due by year-end. WebServer 3.0 is expected to support a bracket set of transactions and distributed Webserver options.
In other areas, Oracle's created a Spatial Data Option which enabled Universal Server users to store geographical data in their databases and integrate it with other applications built upon Universal Server. The option ships in February.
Acorn Computer Group Plc and Cirrus Logic Inc are offering a reference design kit from which to build Internet devices. The pair say it's ideal for; set-top boxes, telephones, multimedia kiosks and obviously NCs. They'll look for OEMs for the kit, which is based on Acorn's RISC OS and on Cirrus' WebSet version of an Advanced RISC Machines Ltd 32-bit RISC chip, the PS7500FE. Cirrus will also provide schematics and Acorn a bunch of browsers, e-mail and other applications.
AOL COMES CLEAN WITH HEAVY FIRST QUARTER LOSSES
America Online Inc came clean with its first quarter figures last week, which makes us wonder what the highly-paid and highly-regarded analysts on the Street have been doing for all these years, believing the company when it said that most subscribers stayed for at least two years.
For that was the reason behind the Dulles, Virginia on-line services company taking a previously-announced $385m write-off for deferred subscription acquisition costs, where it had previously capitalized the advertising costs over at least two years. The analysts' friend, the Wall Street Journal even gently put the boot in, noting that in taking the hit the company was "reducing to vapor what accountants Ernst & Young had certified as solid nine weeks earlier." The company is now taking all advertising costs as expenses.
As a result, first quarter net losses were $353.7m, up from losses of $10.9m last time, that included a $17.0m charge for acquired research and development, on revenues that were up 77% to $350.0m. Marketing spending increased in the quarter, ahead of its traditionally strong December and March quarters, when it's too cold to go outside too much. AOL added around 400,000 net new subscribers in the quarter, taking it to roughly 6.9m users worldwide. The average hourly usage came to 6.95 hours per member and hit its highest level ever in October, said the company.
The company's changing its model to rely less on subscribers, and introduced a flat $19.95 rate last week that takes affect next month though it warns that it "lacks historical experience with this pricing." There were no details as to what alternative higher-margin revenue streams the company is planning to get into, though electronic commerce is thought to be a central plank. Shares were down $1.125 at $24.00 before the numbers came out after the close yesterday. They have been as high as $71.00 in the last 12 months.
SPAMMERS LAUNCH ANTI-TRUST SUIT AGAINST AOL
Just days after losing a First Amendment appeal to prevent America Online Inc from blocking its mass e-mailings, Philadelphia's Cyber Promotions Inc is again seeking a court restraining order against America, this time under federal antitrust laws.
Cyber Promotions' resident, Sanford Wallace, claims that AOL is blocking Cyber Promotions email "for the purpose of monopolizing electronic advertising to AOL customers". He accuses the service provider of being "hypocritical" and "anti-competitive", since AOL engages in direct mail campaigns of its own. America Online recently introduced technology, called PreferredMail that, allows customers to choose whether or not they can receive junk mail.
Cyber Promotions complains that PreferredMail automatically blocks its mailings and makes it too complicated for customers to choose to receive blocked email. Wallace says his company would be happy if PreferredMail would default to allow mass mailings rather than to block them. He adds that there is also "a good likelihood" that Cyber Promotions will appeal its First Amendment case. AOL could not be reached for comment.
NOW DEC OFFLOADS MAILWORKS E-MAIL TO I/G OPENWARE
Digital Equipment Corp has inked a deal with I/G OpenWare Inc of West Chester, Pennsylvania, that offloads the continued development, marketing and support of the MailWorks electronic messaging technology on non-DEC Unix platforms.
MailWorks - an evolution of DEC's original proprietary All-in-1 mail system - is an electronic messaging server that's scalable to large systems, and supports SMTP, MIME, X.400 and X.500 standards amongst others, and can work with MAPI-compliant clients such as Microsoft Exchange and POP3 clients such as Netscape mail, Motif and DEC's own TeamLinks Mail.
I/G OpenWare plans ports to IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and SCO Unix, with IBM first in the queue, scheduled for March 1997. DEC will continue to develop the product for its own Digital Unix platforms and retains the MailWorks trademark rights.
US ROBOTICS BOUNCES BACK FUELLED BY INTERNET ACCESS
US Robotics Corp hit back with year-end figures suggesting that last year's slip was just temporary. The Skokie, Illinois networking hardware and modem manufacturer turned in end of year net profits up 158% on last year, at $170.0m, as revenues rose 122% to $1.98bn.
The company also announced job losses of "around 200, but less than 300," - it wouldn't be more specific - as it did some pruning after taking on "more than 3,000" people just in the last twelve months, more than doubling its workforce to around 6,000. US Robotics took a $54m hit in the fourth quarter relating to the acquisition of Scorpio Communications Ltd, and last year's numbers included a $29.5m merger-related hit. It said it saw demand growing across its entire range, with the Internet, not surprisingly, the principal growth factor. But it did point to its Total Control wide area network hub products as being particularly strong, with sales of around $400m in the fiscal just ended.
Fourth quarter net profits were down 61% at $13.5m, after the $54.0m hit, on revenues that were up 108% at $611.4m. Gross margins for the quarter were 41.9%, the same as the previous one. The margins in the desktop modem and PC Card businesses fell as prices eroded, but this was offset by an increase in higher-margin systems products revenues as a percentage of the total, said the company.
The acquisition of Scorpio Technologies Ltd took USR into the Asynchronous Transfer Mode business, and this, and the development of the x2 56Kbps modem technology, will be an important part of its business in the next few years (OR 21), and the systems products will increase as a percentage of sales over the same period, said the company. It warned that sales and marketing expenses are likely to rise in the first half of the current fiscal due to the launch of 56Kbps modem products and other new technologies, and therefore margins are likely to be slightly less than those just reported. www.usr.com
INNOTECH HOPES TO IMPROVE SEARCH RESULTS WITH NETRESULTS
Innotech Multimedia Corp is introducing a Web site indexing and retrieval toolset written in Java called NetResults, for what it reckons is a fraction of the cost of rival offerings. The North York, Ontario-based company that started life eight years ago as a network integrator and has also branched out into so-called edutainment CD-ROM publishing, is getting into another new area with NetResults.
Innotech reckons the main difference, apart form the price and the fact that it's written in Java, is the NetResults cascading capability, whereby visitors to a site can search across multiple servers with one search and can display the search findings in various ways, including histograms. The suite comprises an indexing tool, the search engine and some related Java applets.
Innotech vice president Simon Arnison reckons the company's estimate of selling 500 copies by the year-end is conservative and he says fellow-Canadian Corel Corp is looking at the stuff. NetResults is available now for Windows 95 and NT $2,000. It's only available from the Web site right now until more conventional channels are set up. www.netresults-search.com
PointCast Inc's business model is changing again, and it is now planning to use the Teletext concept to deliver news to users not connected to the Internet. It's recent deal with WavePhore Inc (OR No 23) will see it inserterting its material into the vertical blanking interval of more than 250 Public Television Service stations US-wide. By broadcasting its data via the television signal, says Inter@ctive Week, PointCast will be able to sidestep the problems it has hit in clogging corporate data networks, and becomes viable for residential users that do not want to use their telephone lines to handle PointCast's frequent sorties to the Internet to retrieve news. Intel Corp's Intercast receiver, already included in some multimedia computers, will be needed to capture the broadcast data. www.pointcast.com
ACTIVE GROUP IN LIMBO, OPEN GROUP DEFERS ITS BLESSING
by Maureen O'Gara
Sun's prophecy proved dead on. (Actually, Sun's political agitation - and IBM's too, we hear - made it a self-fulfilling prophecy but anyway....) Sun said before the Open Group board convened on Friday November 1 that the board - where Sun and IBM sit along with 14 other vendors - would defer sanctioning Microsoft's proposed Active Group "independent standards body" scheme by deferring its sanction of Microsoft's first Pre-Structured Technology joint development submission - and it did.
To hear Sun tell it, the board didn't even bother to vote. It was "unanimous" in its decision that it hadn't enough data to extend its hands in blessing and withdrew the vote. (This is the self-same board that back in September had on short order unanimously voted to give this Active Group thing a try.) Like multiple agendas, there are several threads to this tale and of course it's being played out against a backdrop of intense and prejudiced competition.
First off, sources say that Microsoft's interests were ill-served by the "giddy, gushing" fawning of the Open Group staff which, in attempting to persuade the various board members to vote "aye" - and hence invest the Open Group itself with some relevance - misrepresented a host of issues to them as being resolved that weren't. Once the board realized it was being hornswoggled, it reportedly lashed back by deferring its decision. Certain members of the Open Group board, who are also sensitive to the amount of PR Microsoft has managed to derive from this thing so far, are reportedly ticked off with the Open Group people for not acting in what they consider to be the best interests of the organization and there is now said to be "bad blood" between them. Microsoft wasn't blamed for taking advantage of the situation but the board or factions on it reportedly bridled at the attempt to "ram it through"..."with no concessions to standards practices."
REMAINING ISSUES
Open Group managers have slunk into the woodwork as far as we're concerned. No one from the top down returned calls despite promises that they would and their lady press agent was doing her best at spin control. The issues that remain, according to Open Group board members like Sun and IBM, are such substantive little items as whether Redmond intends Open Group's X/Open arm to drive ActiveX (or whatever's actually on the table) into a standard (which is what this whole thing's supposed to be about) and how licensing is supposed to work. There is also the little matter of ActiveX or DCOM interoperability with the Object Management Group's rival Corba scheme, which is dear to the hearts of many on the board, not to speak of the process-busting way Microsoft and the Open Group went about setting up the Active Group to begin with: PSTs are supposed to emanate from Open Group's technical managers, who are all from vendor firms, by the way, not come handed down from on high along with the novelty of a Steering Committee hand-picked by Microsoft.
Sun refused to be drawn on how it really feels about the Steering Committee, but - lest we guess - it did venture to say that the board would "keep voting [the proposal] down until Microsoft learned to play by the same rules as everyone else." Sun said Microsoft has until the next board meeting in Rome on December 12 to clarify its positions.
Microsoft, meanwhile, despite rumors that it was canceled, held the first meeting of the Steering Committee last Thursday November 7 in Long Beach, California where it was having its Professional Developers Conference. A second meeting is reportedly supposed to be held this week. The committee includes Microsoft, DEC, HP, SAP, Siemens Nixdorf, Software AG, Sybase's Powersoft unit, CA, NCR, Lotus, Adobe, Borland, VideoSoft, Wall Data and Sheridan Systems. (IBM thought it was awfully funny to have an advisory meeting scheduled after the fact but, hey, this is high tech. It not only sent a Lotus guy along but somebody from Armonk, we hear.)
Reports from the meeting say HP's Object Group board member told it the PST would "absolutely" pass on December 12. Microsoft needs a majority of nine of 16 votes to establish both the PST and formalize the Active Group. Microsoft last week showed no signs of picking up its toys and going home. Criticisms were rampant - even among Microsoft's friends - about the thrown-together nature of the PST. One friend said it looked like "high school" work.
Microsoft's johnny-on-the-spot Cornelius Willis claimed, however, that "it was more complete and more thorough than any other PST they've even had" and took a detached position about clearing up any lingering questions from the board. Open Group people are talking to the board's staff people, he said, indicating that Microsoft itself itself wasn't going to supply any more data 'cause it was already all there.
A Steering Committee member, however, said that the Open Group is rewriting the PST and that there is now an authoring group as is usual in Open Group PSTs. Willis repeatedly cited the public record created for the Active Group kickoff meeting October 1 to rebuff criticisms and claimed, for instance, that the licensing terms were all completely spelled out there.
Perhaps because of the shoddiness of the draft submitted to the board there is a good deal of (honest?) confusion about what the PST says even among those who claim to have read the confidential document. One said it sought to replace the MS/RPC, which is already based on the DCE RPC, with the DCE RPC with Microsoft extensions. (Got that?) Willis, who said he had not seen the document, however, said "No, that's not true." That that was an eventual intent but that it was too soon and that the immediate point was to license ActiveX on Unix - still apparently a blending of Software AG's DCOM on Unix port with DEC's DCE - and make DCE security an ActiveX option.
CORBA CHAOS
IBM, however, claims it seeks to reinvent server interaction that already exists in DCE and Corba. Again the touchy subject of Corba, ActiveX' deadly enemy. Willis claimed that just as soon as this PST business is resolved and the Active Group is up and running - not before like some on the board seem to want - that Microsoft would be willing to come to grips with Corba provided the Corba contingent tells it which part of the "fragmented chaos that is Corba" it is supposed to address. Corba is a spec not source code like Microsoft is providing, Willis went on, and there are 15 implementations of the thing and they're all different.
The unaccommodating Mr Willis also denied that his chief Paul Maritz has had a proposal from the OMG on his desk for the last few weeks, as OMG told us, and said all that was there was the message "Let's talk."
Bogey men could easily be read into this since Microsoft's ole buddy DEC reportedly had a hand in preparing the PST and the whole thing calls to mind the battle royal that raged back in late 1994 - that DEC lost - over which object request broker should be mandated for Corba 2 interoperability between ORBs: the Sun-backed TCP/IP-based Universal Network Objects (UNO) protocol or the DEC/HP-driven DCE-based Common InterORB Protocol.
The defeat was seen at the time as a serious political loss for Microsoft and COM and DEC swore its alternative would become the de facto standard no matter what. No matter what anyone says the PST is about, we suspect it's a fight for control of the infrastructure and he who controls the infrastructure wins.
GERMAN INSTITUTE PUTS NEURAL NETWORK OPTIONS ON THE NET
Institut fur Neuroinformatik has a Java programme that reportedly allows engineers to create and train neural networks using either the popular back-propagation-of-errors learning method or by growing a unique neural architecture specifically adapted to an application.
A fully programmed neural-network demonstration can be downloaded from its web site:.http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-unibochum.de/ini/VDM/research/gsn/DmoGNG/GNG.html. Electronic Engineering Times reports most neural-network learning algorithms force the engineer to choose a particular network topology ahead of time which means the developer must choose between rival approaches to learning before they understand the advantages and disadvantages of each.
The Institute's work is focused on automatically growing a network topology that is perfect for a particular application.
HITACHI, ACER DO INTERNET TERMINALS, INTELEVISION
Acer Inc is becoming a pivotal company in the industry and is increasingly the first port of call for both the Japanese and the US majors when they are seeking an off-shore partner. Now the Taiwanese company has bought a 15% stake in Hitachi Television (Taiwan) Ltd from Hitachi Ltd for $1.8m to seal a deal under which the two will jointly develop and market information products aimed at the consumer market.
Acer and Hitachi will co-operate in areas such as Internet terminals and personal computer-ready television sets. Acer, now the world's seventh-biggest computer maker, already manufactures personal computers on an OEM basis for Hitachi.
CISCO WINS SUPPORT FOR "TAG" IP SWITCHING
Cisco has lined up ten companies that are to work with the San Jose, California-based company in developing its Tag Switching technology. According to Cisco, the ten will work with it to define Tag Switching as an open standard set of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards for scaling the networks for Internet and large corporate intranets.
Tag Switching is Cisco's own version of IP Switching - a technology creating a lot of interest which switches IP traffic over Aynchronous Transfer Mode hardware (CI No 3,008). Rival vendors such as NEC, Fore Systems and DEC have signed to take IP Switching from Ipsilon the company that first developed the technology (CI No 2,923). Another, Bay Networks has announced its own IP Switching technology.
Cisco submitted draft specifications for Tag Switching to the IETF in September. The new group will discuss the specifications as submitted and establish an IETF working group. The ten companies joining Cisco are Optical Data Systems Inc, Whitetree Inc, Adaptec Inc Efficient Networks Inc, Olicom, Net2Net Corp, Network General Corp, Radcom Limited, AG Communication Systems and NUKO Information Systems Inc.
Cisco says that Tag Switching running on its Cisco 7500 series routers and its Lightstream 1010 campus ATM switches will be available in for field trials in the first half of 1997. Versions for the Cisco StrataCom BPX wide area ATM switch are expected to become available later in 1997.
CISCO DOESN'T ALLOW ITS ACQUISITIONS TO SLOW THE PACE
After its $4.1bn acquisition of Stratacom Inc, network switch supplier Cisco Systems Inc looks almost invincible in its position as the number one supplier of corporate networking equipment and its first quarter numbers show it is still very much the one to catch.
Revenue was $1.43bn, up 80% on the same period last year; net income was down slightly at $180.9m after a one-time charge of $174.6m for writing down research and development costs associated with its Telebit Corp acquisition, and a gain of $55.1m on the sale of a minority stock holding. Earnings per share were $0.26. Excluding the charge and gain, net income would have been $320.8m, or $0.47 per share, just ahead of First Call's $0.46 average of analysts' estimates.
Following its Stratacom, Granite Systems (for gigabit Ethernet), Nashoba Networks (Token Ring) and Telebit (ISDN modems) purchases - and pending acquisition of Netsys Technologies (for network modeling) - Cisco finds itself in the position of dominating two interlinked markets which are exploding. Routers are required not only as one of the essential building blocks of the internet, but also for building internal intranets.
It is difficult to see any threat to Cisco at present. The internet and the intranet markets are both expected to show high growth rates for the next several years, with overall networking products expected to show between 30% and 50% a year growth. And while rivals such as Bay Networks and 3Com are growing fast, and in some areas have highly competitive products, they are not catching up. Cisco shares closed up $1.12 at $63.75 on the day but dropped back slightly in after hours trading following the release of its Q1 figures.
CISCO BOOSTS ITS PIX FIREWALL OFFERING WITH INTERNET ACCESS
Cisco Systems Inc has added Cut-Through Proxy to its Cisco PIX Firewall, an addition that, says the company, will boost the standalone hardware devices performance with Internet and intranet access.
Cut-Through Proxy technology, increases the speed of security verification in a network by reducing the network overhead associated with UNIX-based proxy server firewalls, says the Santa Clara, California-based company.
Cisco's Cut-Through Proxy authenticates users at the application layer like a proxy server, but once the user is authenticated, the Cisco PIX Firewall shifts the session flow, establishing a direct link between the source and destination while maintaining session state information. This capability provides faster network performance without sacrificing the security of the network, says Cisco.
This provides faster network throughput and minimises network bottlenecks while protecting networks from outside intrusion. Additionally, Cut-Through Proxy offers enhanced user authentication capabilities through streamlined verification of authorised network users. Software upgrades are available at no additional charge for all customers of Cisco's SmartNet program, Cisco's technical support service.
BANYAN CUTS WORKFORCE AND CLOSES SOME FACILITIES
Banyan Systems Inc, of Westborough, Massachusetts warns that it expects to record a pre-tax charge of between $3m and $5m in the current quarter to cover the cost of an executive management realignment and corporate restructuring. It is cutting about 100 jobs, 15% of the workforce and closing some facilities. The company is also looking for a new chief executive after David Mahoney, who has been chairman, president and CEO was shunted aside to the post of vice-chairman. Jeffrey Glidden, senior vice-president and chief financial officer since 1991, is acting president and CEO.
Banyan also plans a substantial reduction in its worldwide channel inventories, and expects to decrease product ships to resellers by about $7m to $10m, leading to lower turnover and a loss for the current quarter. It also expects to take a non-cash charge for previously-recorded deferred tax assets against fourth quarter figures.
With the decline in its network operating system business, Banyan has not exactly been prospering for some time, and a year ago, it recorded a fourth quarter loss of $17.3m or $1.03 a share, and that included restructuring charges of $11.1m, or 66 cents a share.
VISIGENIC TOUTS "OPEN FORTE" ARCHITECTURE
Visigenic Software Inc opened for business in Europe last week with founder and chairman Roger Sippl describing his company's collection of database access and object messaging technologies as "an open architecture version of Forte," the eponymous three-tier application development architecture.
Like other object request broker vendors now supplying technology to large-scale application development projects, Sippl says customers want the scalability ORBs can offer without the proprietary 4GL programming language and forms model that Forte and others enforce. Sippl says he'll supply database transparency (its ODBC products) and object messaging (VisiBroker) and let users choose their own programming languages and forms package.
Sippl also looks forward to tapping the 20m-odd Netscape Communicator clients that will be using run-time versions of the Visigenic VisiBroker request broker for accessing Corba objects from their Web browsers.
Although these aren't development installations, Sippl nevertheless believes that Visigenic will be able to sell ORB monitoring tools to Webmasters and expects to offer a set of tools for redeploying Corba applications on to the Web, or beyond the intranet, as well as a set of Corba services which developers can plug-in to their applications, presumably to provide security, transaction processing and other connectivity options. Some are in beta right now and will be out next quarter.
Sippl reckons object wars should be avoided at all costs and is ready and willing to tell Microsoft his Corba story if Microsoft would just let him, but of course it won't right now. Visigenic, like so many other companies whose allegiance lies with the Object Management Group's Corba, was not invited to the Active Group meeting in New York last month - a decision he called "foolish" - and Sippl reckons Microsoft is just "fighting with their imagination."
Iona
Visigenic's VisiBroker for ActiveX Bridge currently provides one-way access to Corba or ActiveX stored objects on Corba or DCOM servers from C++ or Visual Basic Windows client applications over IIOP on the wire (OR 23). Bi-directional links are due in February.
While not out to knock Visigenic's product - the ORB vendors are keen to grow the Corba market in all directions - Dublin-based rival Iona Technologies Ltd says it's been delivering this functionality in its Orbix request broker since the summer. Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) is only available in a beta form in NT shipments. Iona expects the spec to change before production ships begin which is why it and other Corba ORB vendors are not currently supporting DCOM protocols at the wire level. Visigenic, Iona and others will be submitting DCOM-to-Corba mapping technologies to Part B of Object Management Group's Corba-to-COM specification programme.
Visigenic responds to Iona's claims by trumpeting what it believes are its firsts - to Java, to a Java ORB on the server and to IIOP. Rather than wait for Microsoft's adoption of IIOP, Sippl believes a class of Universal ORBs will emerge which provide multi-platform messaging while hiding the underlying object model, like the multiple database connections ODBC has enabled.
Visigenic has opened an office in Paris, and will open others in the UK and Germany shortly. Netscape, Platinum Technology Inc and Cisco Systems Inc paid $8m between for a total stake of less than 10% in Visigenic last June. Netscape recently announced the inclusion of Visigenic's VisiBroker for Java in its Communicator client stuff (OR 21). Sippl said Platinum is eyeing the ORB technology for use in its systems administration software tools, having put the ODBC drivers in virtually all its software already.
Cisco's take-up of Visigenic technology seems dependent on the success of the Corba Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). If it takes off, the Cisco would be interested in anything that's necessary to handle the network traffic, such as VisiBroker. Visigenic went public in August, and is not expected to reach profitability until its third, December quarter of 1998, according to First Call estimates.
MITSUBISHI, INTERTRUST LAUNCH E-COMMERCE CONSORTIUM
Mitsubishi Corp is teaming with Sunnyvale, California-based InterTrust Technologies Corp to develop a secure electronic commerce standard.
InterTrust has developed the InterTrust Commerce Architecture which is a general purpose commerce and rights management architecture. Right now there's only the two of them in the consortium, but more announcements can be expected in the next few weeks, according to David Van Wie, InterTrust's senior VP research. Softbank Net Solutions, which is already an InterTrust partner elsewhere, is also said to be interested in joining.
Six-year-old InterTrust makes its money at the moment by selling a so-called System Development Kit, which comprises an Internet commerce software node and a bunch of back-office technologies to support it, principally a financial and a usage clearing house system. The former does the financial settlements, and the latter tracks usage and collates information on intellectual property
rights and such. The company has secure software container technology called DigiBox, which is used to house business rules, and any kind of digital content, and these are the things that are transferred between the electronic commerce consumer and vendors. www.intertrust.com
WEBFLOW CONTINUES WITH SECOND CUT OF SAMEPAGE
WebFlow Corp will this week introduce the second cut of its SamePage suite of Web-based collaborative workflow applications.
There are two applications in the suite, SamePage Workspace and Take Action! The Santa Clara, California company says differences this time round in Take Action! are tiered tasking, which means tasks can be sub-divided, the change in the reports section so that it can now be configured by pointing and clicking and the whole thing is now customizable to suit a company's particular project.
In the SamePage Workspace application, support for other types of media have been added, multiple authors can now work on the same document, and documents can be split into chapters for faster download, claims the company. It supports various e-mail systems including Microsoft Mail, cc:Mail, SMTP and POP3 on Windows NT only.
SamePage is used by Sun Microsystems Inc's SMCC and JavaSoft Inc divisions, the latter using it to control the licensing of Java through its Web page and SMCC uses it for controlling new product development.
Next up for WebFlow is Java and ActiveX support in May next year and APIs so the software can be expanded. Also planned are project management and meeting modules. WebFlow closed second round funding of $10m last month, to add to the $4.3m it got earlier this year. SamePage 2.0 is out this week, up on Solaris, SGI Irix and Windows NT, and client access is through Internet Explorer or Navigator. www.webflow.com
MILLENIA LETS YOU CHECK YOUR E-MAIL OVER THE PHONE
Millennia Software Inc, a private and AT&T-funded Internet start-up has rolled out Email Reader 1.0, a voice activated e-mail retrieval system.
The Saratoga, California company claims users can call their PCs from any telephone and retrieve their e-mail messages. It's based on AT&T Watson voice processing technology and Millennia's voiceLink engine. It requires a Pentium PC, Windows 95, a TAPI- compliant voice modem and retrieves Netscape, Eudora, POP3, and Microsoft Exchange e-mail. It costs $90. www.msw.com
BULLETPROOF FIRES OFF ITS FOURTH JDESIGNERPRO ROUND
BulletProof Corp has announced the 1.4 cut of its jDesignerPro Java development environment, geared for database applications and deployment. It includes all the usual components and database connectivity, and this time has added a project management feature, with each developers' name, progress and status shown, as well as the ability to change code inside the building environment, rather than having to alter the code once it is built, as was the case with 1.3.
BulletProof says it's not up against Symantec Corp or Borland International Inc in the Java development space, as the Los Gatos, California company sees its strength in the deployment of Java applets, rather than just the building of them. The first cut only came out in August. jDesignerPro 1.4 costs $99 for ten users through Thanksgiving, when the price will go up slightly; $1,000 buys a 200-user license, $2,500 a license for 500 users. www.bulletproof.com
FREE INTERNET CONNECTION: $29.95 + STRINGS
If you live in the Bay Area, you can now get what Hyper Net USA is billing as "free Internet services for Bay Area residents and businesses" who do not mind having 3"x1" ads running down just outside of their browsers as they surf.
Of course this "free" service does have a $30 sign-up fee. And users must fill out a 30-40 question marketing survey. Users must also complete additional marketing surveys, "every now and then", according to Hyper Net president Jay Shah.
The service may not be around for ever, though. Singh says Hyper Net will be evaluating how the service, which has over 116,000 subscribers in Japan, flies in the US over the next six months and will continue with it, "if we can make it profitable," after which, who knows?. www.hypernet.co.jp/
HP READY WITH WEB PRINTER MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Hewlett-Packard Co's Internet Solutions Operation has launched the Web version of its JetAdmin printer management software for managing printers from a Web browser (OR 8).
Web JetAdmin can manage all HP printers and any printer connected to a HP JetDirect EX print server. It doesn't need any special firmware embedded in the printer, according to HP. Web JetAdmin enables a user to set up a custom map of their office, displaying the location of each printer and any landmarks the user wishes to add to help identify the printers. The icons change color depending on the status of the printer, and being accessible through a browser means that the user doesn't need to be physically in the office. There are three levels of security: Web JetAdmin access, device groups and individual devices. Web JetAdmin is up at www.hp.com for free, supporting HP-UX, Sun Solaris, SunOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, with backwards compatibility to version 3.51, NetWare and OS/2 Warp and Server
ICHAT TO HAVE AVATARS, NETGRAVITY ADVERTISING
Ichat Inc is adding a variety of features to its Rooms chat software including Internet Relay Chat (IRC) support, avatars, VRML navigation and the ability to drag and drop files or URLs into chat sessions.
Rooms 2.2 will also ship with something called a "BOT API", which lets administrators create an automated robot to provide help during chat sessions. It can do things like change naughty words to characters (@#!!%!) and kick unruly chatters off the site. Ichat has written Windows 3.1 and Java versions of its Rooms clients and inked partnering deals to enable Rooms site administrators to dish up advertising from a NetGravity server and audit advertising using I/Pro's advertising auditing services.
Ichat says future releases of Rooms will have conferencing and APIs that allow for more customization on the server side. Rooms 2.2 will cost the same as 2.0 - starting at $1,000 for 25 users. It's expected to be announced this week. www.ichat.com
INFOGEAR READY WITH THE IPHONE INTERNET TELEPHONE
There is definitely a market at the right price for a simple telephone that includes enough of a processor to run Internet phone software and little else, but InfoGear Technology Corp of Redwood City, California has gone rather further.
According to PC Week, the iPhone Internet Telephone will provide an ordinary telephone coupled with a proprietary graphical World Wide Web interface and functions such as electronic mail, on-line directories, electronic commerce and telecommunications services.
The initial version, to be manufactured by Cidco Inc under a non-exclusive agreement, will include a 14.4Kbps modem, keyboard and small 16-shade monochrome screen, and sell for under $500.
Future models will go to 28.8Kbps and ISDN and include a colour screen, and InfoGear reckons there is also a market for cellular and other wireless models, and a PABX-compatible version. InfoGear says it is in discussions with three phone companies to bundle the phones with telecommunications services such as Internet access, Caller ID and voice mail.
The race between coverage on the Internet versus the television was closer than the one that mattered, reports Reuter. The first US presidential election since the invention of the Web was a test that the net had trouble keeping up with. The in-depth information was sitting there, but users couldn't get access due to the sheer volume of traffic. And the TV networks were first to call a Clinton victory.
By 8am PST both Bill Clinton's www.cg96.org and Bob Dole's www.dole96.com were both busy, but tellingly that was not the case at Ross Perot's www.perot.org. There was no live news at Perot's site but a plea to "Make History Tuesday," by giving the Reform Party 25% of the vote, thus securing him federal funding on a par with the other two parties. By about midday the Clinton site was displaying a sort of cyber-bumper sticker saying merely "I Voted Election 96" that users could smugly paste on their personal Web pages.
LYNXOS TO FEATURE SPYGLASS SOFTWARE DEVELOPER KIT
Spyglass Inc continues its campaign to license its browsing technology to everyone and anyone in the embedded market. This week, it is expected to announce a deal with Lynx Real-Time Systems to incorporate Spyglass's client SDK into LynxOS, which is also picking up the Java run-time environment.
Last week, Scientific-Atlanta Inc's PowerTV Inc licensed Spyglass Inc's client SDK technology to adapt the PowerTV operating system for the Web. PowerTV's set-top box system is currently being used in trials by BellSouth Corp and Pacific Telesis Group Inc. Spyglass has recently inked similar deals with ISI, Microware, Bandai and QNX (OR 22). www.spyglass.com
PILOT'S WEB READER IN BETA
Pilot Software Inc's Internet Publisher add-on to its on-line analytical processing Decision Support Suite Version 5 has now gone into beta testing, for general availability in the first quarter of next year. Web browsers for the front-end client systems make it more cost-effective for occasional users to access information from adata warehouse, says Pilot.
Using Active X or Java controls, browser users can gain access to dynamic rather than static information, using simplified versions of the query facilities available on Pilot's full-blown client front-end. A "personal cube" feature allows for the replication of relevant data to field sales people using laptops for off-line analysis. Pricing begins at $10,000 per server, with no user limits. Pilot's Decision Support Suite runs on Unix and Windows NT servers, with Windows 3.1 and 95, NT and now Netscape Navigator or Windows Explorer clients.
DOT Gossip
With Microsoft Stock passing the $143.5 level last week, Bill Gates is now worth a shade over $20bn, which is a rise of almost $7bn from a year ago.
NetObjects Inc Fusion for the Mac is released today, Monday (OR 23) and the company will also announce new distribution deals with Apple and AT&T via their Web sites. www.netobjects.com
AltaVista Technology (AVT) says it's "surprised" by the lawsuit filed by DEC over the alleged misuse of DEC's AltaVista trademark on www.altavista.com (OR 23). AVT says it had been in discussions with DEC on how to resolve the issue. The AVT site late last week continued to feature a "Search with Digital's Alta Vista" option that looked a little familiar. The little-known email software developer won't say how many hits it's getting.
Reuters reports that Rupert Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting and Australia's OzEmail will announce a joint venture to distribute advertising to servers around the world via the Web. Details on the technology, developed by OzEmail, and the company's strategy are expected to be announced on December 3 in New York.
The SunRiver Group, which owns 50% of SunRiver Corp, is trying to oust SunRiver Corp's chief executive Gerald Youngblood, take over the board and make other changes at the company and its Internet software subsidiary TradeWave Corp, hears our sister paper ClieNT Server News. SunRiver's other subsidiary is Boundless Corp, a Citrix licensee and maker of network computers, which hopes to springboard off of TradeWave's business.
HP's Java-enabled HP-UX with an SDK and VM, available now at www.hp.com/go/JAVA
Sun Microsystems Inc does not have a conscientious objection to including disks on a network computer and Ed Zander, president of SMCC said in Brussels last week that the company may in the future ship a version of its JavaStation with a hard disk. "In a short time it will have Flash RAM capability and Just-In-Time chip set compilers," he said. "There is an opportunity longer term to see if we can put in a hard disk." He added that the feedback after the JavaStation launch went against making the machine more complex.
Acer Inc has bought a 15% stake in Hitachi Television (Taiwan) Ltd from Hitachi Ltd for $1.8m to seal a deal under which the two will jointly develop and market information products aimed at the consumer market. Acer and Hitachi will co-operate in areas such as Internet terminals and PC-ready televisions. Acer, already manufactures PCs on an OEM basis for Hitachi.
Intel Corp's Java media components, Realistic Sound eXperience (RSX) and Realistic Display miXer (RDX) will be part of Microsoft Corp's third party program, Gallery for Java.
Former Lotus VP Don Bulens is being sued for an unspecified amount by IBM Lotus for allegedly luring an un-named former Lotus salesperson to his Radnet Inc start-up. Bulens claims that Lotus is picking on him because it can't compete on the Internet. Lotus admits it's trying to stop further solicitation and recruitment, but scoffs at Bulens's suggestion that it is singling out Radnet because of competitive pressures.
Sunnyvale-based Global Village Communications Inc announced plans to offer its first modem product for the Windows market. The TelePort 33.6 Speakerphone modem for Windows is designed to give customers a high-speed modem combined with a professional-quality, stand-alone speakerphone. It can operate whether the computer is on or off; it should cost about $240. www.globalvillage.com
IBM Corp is planning a set of electronic commerce announcements this Tuesday in New York for various vertical markets
Netscape says it wants the $90m or so it will raise from its share issue to acquire additional office space and to make building improvements. Some of the money may be used to invest in other companies and some proceeds may also be used to buy or invest in businesses, products or to buy rights to technologies, although it doesn't presently have any plans or agreements.
Matsushita's Panasonic and Proxima are using Diba Inc's reference designs as the basis for new Internet appliances. At Comdex Fall, Panasonic will show a Diba-derived Internet telephone and Proxima an Internet-enabled multimedia projector.
Microsoft's the latest to license Object Design Inc's skinny ObjectStore PSE for Java database. It's using it to provide persistence storage for its Java SDK which will enable users to download Java applets, change them, then store the applets and changes.
An Oracle database written in Java? Oracle SVP Object, Internet and Groupware Tools Joseph Duncan says Java is being integrated into Oracle's database products and he would not rule out the possibility of Oracle re-writing its database in Java. "If you were to re-write the database, the obvious choice would be Java, Java is the language of the second half of the 90's. It will play the role that C played in this next era". Oracle says Java will be in the database in the first half of 1997.
A demo of Sanga Corp's Sanga Pages will be added to the software bundled with Sun's Netra j Java servers from December (OR 23).
Apple Computer Inc released a beta of version 1.0 of the Mac OS Runtime for Java, an implentation of the Java virtual machine and run-time environment. Mac developers can now create Java applets and embed Java functionality into PowerPC and 68000 code. It's free at www.devtools.apple/com/mrj.
Another Internet casino is about to deal its first hand at www.gamblenet.com. Operated by Grenada-based Sports International Ltd and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Interactive Gaming & Communications Corp, gamblenet is currently in beta, offering demos of blackjack and slot machines. An account must be established with Sports International, which already offers sports betting via the Internet, and the server is situated in Grenada in order to operate within that country's gaming laws. The full Casino will be operational within 60 days, IGC said.
Japan Computer Corp is selling its iBOX Home Internet terminals for home use, at about 100 Sunkus & Associates Inc. convenience stores in the Tokyo area. Regular retail price for the terminals is 50,000-60,000 yen ($450-$540), but 100 will be discounted to 19,800 yen ($175) to test market reaction. The initial target was 110,000 terminals, only 15,000-16,000 terminals have been sold.
Oh, and JavaSoft's working up a complete Java branding programme that it doesn't want to tell anyone about yet.
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WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
November 11 - 15 1996 Issue No 24
HP REVS PRAESIDIUM WEB AUTHORIZATION SERVER
Hewlett-Packard Co will this week unveil the second version of its Praesidium Web-based Authorization Server and a more complete looking package of services and third-party tools.
Authorization Server is the center-piece of HP's Praesidium security strategy, which is derived from its acquisition last year of SecureWare Inc, which developed B1-level security with HP that does not rely on firewalls or encryption.
The new version introduces so-called secure Web pages, so URL and CGI script access to Web sites can be controlled and browser-based administration, plus a bunch of new platforms.
The whole package comprises Authorization Server, an applications security server, smart card technology and VirtualVault Trusted Gateway. The database underneath at the moment is Informix, but HP and Oracle are working on a version of the latter's WebServer.
Tools partners include Netscape, Nortel, Texas Instruments, Antares, Passport and Forte and there's four systems integrators plus HP itself. Authorization Server 2.0 is out December 1 on Windows 3.x, NT 3.51, HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX for between $35,000 and $50,000 per server. www.hp.com
IBM LICENSES JAVAOS FOR NCS AND RESALE ON BOARDS
IBM Corp has licensed the skinny JavaOS operating system from Sun Microsystems Inc's JavaSoft Inc subsidiary for its network computers and will be able re-license to it other vendors under the agreement.
It has also picked up the HotJava browser-based software to develop Java applications, though it would not give any details of those plans last week.
It is evaluating a bunch of other HotJava technologies such as HotJava Views groupware that it may or may not use depending on how its other NC software options turn out, including the Navio client software from the Netscape Communications Corp subsidiary of the same name and the Java- based groupware components the Lotus Notes division is creating. The re-licensing will be done by IBM Microelectronics, which will sell boards running JavaOS to OEM customers.
IBM had been using an operating system written by Network Computing Devices Inc - on its network computer OEMed from NCD - but will now use JavaOS in all its NCs, of which there are three: the NCD-manufactured PowerPC 403-based device, a PowerPC 603e-based reference board and an unnamed Intel Corp-based device, though it's not clear yet whether this will emerge as a board or a fully-fledged machine.
This implies that IBM will port JavaOS to at least PowerPC and Intel instruction sets. IBM will supposedly show all three devices at Comdex this month.
The Java marketing arm of IBM's Internet division is setting up Java Validation Centers in San Mateo, California - which with six staff initially is over the road from JavaSoft - and Waltham, Massachusetts, where developers can test Java work on Sun, HP and IBM equipment, supposedly at no charge. "We're joined at the hip with JavaSoft," IBM believes.
IBM will have Java-enabled all of its operating systems by year-end. It reckons all its top 150 accounts are implementing or will be doing Java. JavaOS is currently up on Sun's Sparc RISC, Nat Semi's NS486SXF-25 and the Mitsubishi/DEC StrongARM implementation.
LOTUS POURS JAVA ALL OVER ITS PRODUCT LINE
IBM Corp's Lotus Development Corp is giving its entire product line a Java makeover, starting with Lotus Domino 4.5 - the next cut of Notes due by the year-end.
With that version, Notes clients will be able to execute Java applets and the Domino server will be able to serve pages that contain Java applets or contain scripting languages such as VBScript or JavaScript, which is slightly different from being a full-blown applet server.
The company also laid out its Java plans for the next full release of Domino, due sometime next year, but this being Internet time, Lotus could not risk waiting until its Lotusphere97 gathering in January to tell everyone, although it did promise more details then.
Lotus VP marketing for Notes and Domino, Tim Dempsey, described the clutch of announcements as the hill Lotus has to climb to stay competitive. Lotus reaffirmed it's commitment to the Object Management Group's Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) and will use IIOP as the way Java classes will access Domino applications. It will make the object store, messaging and other Notes application services available to Java applets. Lotus intends to deliver Java applets that will present a Notes front-end within a browser. The Notes development environment will enable developers to write client-side Java applets.
Meantime, Lotus is busy building a set of tools, which sounds a bit like Office, but is based on JavaSoft's Java Beans component architecture. Lotus already has a set of similar ActiveX controls. The next Notes clients and server will be Notes containers and publishers respectively.
Lotus also said the next Notes client would ship with both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The agreement with both companies stretches to any and all of Lotus' products, and it will decide in time which ones will contain the browsers. www.lotus.com
The race between coverage on the Internet versus the television was closer than the one that mattered, reports Reuter. The first US presidential election since the invention of the Web was a test that the net had trouble keeping up with. The in-depth information was sitting there, but users couldn't get access due to the sheer volume of traffic. And the TV networks were first to call a Clinton victory.
By 8am PST both Bill Clinton's www.cg96.org and Bob Dole's www.dole96.com were both busy, but tellingly that was not the case at Ross Perot's www.perot.org. There was no live news at Perot's site but a plea to "Make History Tuesday," by giving the Reform Party 25% of the vote, thus securing him federal funding on a par with the other two parties. By about
ORACLE SHOWS RISC NCS - KEEPS X86 AND SERVERS HIDDEN
The day began with Scott McNealy's son, Maverick, taking his first public steps before an overcrowded hall of Oracle Corp customers and it ended with CEO Larry Ellison and two dogs named "Nipper and Chipper".
In-between, Oracle gave last week's packed Oracle Open World audience its first real look at the Oracle Network Computer, showcasing a handful of RISC boxes, all based on Acorn Computer Group plc's ARM chip. When the day was over, and the dogs had departed, it seemed that Oracle had left as many questions as answers.
Though Larry Ellison "showed" a 133MHz Pentium NC during his keynote, no more details on the specifications or manufacturers of the Intel NCs were released. Though Oracle spokespeople promise that NC server software has been developed and is ready to be announced, it was not.
Oracle subsidiary Network Computer Inc (NCI) said it did not want to "overwhelm" the media coverage or, possibly, have its announcement compete with last week's election coverage; a pretty thin excuse given that Open World is Oracle's premier international customer event.
THE NETWORK COMPUTER
Of Oracle's 15 original NC manufacturers, five were able to announce details on their machines. In all, seven RISC versions of the NC, from an Acorn reference design centered around its ARM7500FE processor, have now been announced.
Of them, only Acorn and Idea had working NCs targeted at corporate users, though Uniden Corp was there with an empty box it called a wireless NC - expected to be launched at Comdex Fall and shipping in mid- to late 1997. All the others - Thomson Consumer Electronics, Akai, Proton Industrial Electronic Co Ltd, and Funai Electric Co Ltd - are for home use.
Acorn announced four new devices: the Office, ExecPhone, Set-Top-Box NC and the NC TV, though there's no word on when these might appear, or on pricing.
Idea's Internet Client Station, targeted for corporate and educational use, is available now via pilot programs for $650, including server software and limited upgrades. It will eventually sell for $500. Akai Electric Co Ltd's Akai Digital unit will ship its Akai Internet Connection network computer in the first quarter of next year for $350, aimed at home users. Funai's Janesa device will ship next month for less than $500. New to the Oracle NC alliance, Thomson Consumer Electronics will produce a set-top Internet access device for standard televisions that it will sell under the RCA brand-name next Spring for around $300. Thomson Multimedia will introduce a similar device in Europe with Thomson branding. Thomson said it's got plans for other NC devices under the ProScan and GE names.
NetChannel Inc, the television-based Internet content provider, will provide a subscription-based service for the RCA products. The other newcomer is Proton, which will ship its Xavier television set-top box NC to its Taiwanese ISP customers in the Spring of 1997.
The NCs all use smart cards for user authentication. All the vendors were talking about evaluation programs and positive customer response, but nobody had much to say about actual sales, perhaps because NCI hasn't yet announced what kind of servers they're supposed to use.
Sales in the US may prove particularly elusive, since only Thomson and Akai seem to have a strong US presence. Meantime, the NCI subsidiary has licensed Bitstream Inc's Bitstream TrueDoc Character Shape Player to incorporate into it's NC operating system, as well as fonts for various languages from Bitstream and Dynalab.
NC SOFTWARE: HATTRICK
Oracle's answer to Microsoft Office is a front-office suite of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applets for use on Network Computer devices it's calling HatTrick.
Java-based HatTrick applets will be served to NCs connected to the Web-based InterOffice messaging and document management options that run on Oracle's UnivseralServer database. HatTrick is a component of Oracle's Network Computer Architecture vision and will support NCs implementing the NC Reference Profile.
HatTrick enables users to create, e-mail and receive formatted documents without launching separate applications or attaching files. It will be for intranet use initially, but Oracle says the technology is "almost there" for home distribution of a HatTrick-type product. HatTrick applets publish in HTML and require 2Mb RAM and no client disk space. Oracle compares this to Microsoft Office that requires 12Mb RAM and 89Mb client disk space.
HatTrick word processor and presentation graphics applets will ship as part of InterOffice 4.1 next quarter; the spreadsheet applet will ship in the second quarter. A Web version of Oracle's Developer/2000 will ship for NT and Solaris, in the next quarter (OR 22).
WHAT WASN'T ANNOUNCED
Oracle wasn't saying who is going to sell the Oracle NC to its biggest market: businesses in the US or who will be manufacturing the Intel version of the NC. They may well amount to the same thing. The Server is where Oracle will, no doubt, make most of its money out of the NC, but Oracle would only hint at what the NC Server might be. Oracle says NC servers will be sold as a suite of products that will be marketed as turnkey products, with software from NC Inc. Ellison says NC here stands for "no configuration" or "no choice" (sounding a bit like our nemesis here, aren't we, Larry?). They will run on Unix and Windows NT and are expected to be announced in the next two weeks, and shipping by the end of the year.
Oracle isn't saying much more, but Idea, who has been testing its NC's with Oracle server products, says its server package has featured Oracle InterOffice, with a browser front end, HatTrick, some client software and - the key NCI component - authentication software.
NCI has apparently sub-contracted parts of the authentication software from un-named third parties. This latter package would seem to compose a typical intranet turnkey solution, but Oracle has been talking about fancier versions too, for ISPs and large corporations.
NEW ORACLE WEBSERVER AND GIS OPTION
Oracle Corp is offering a new 2.1 cut of its WebServer software which can be used in conjunction with Netscape or Microsoft HTTP servers to deliver database information to browser-based applications.
The new version includes an integrated Java Virtual Machine and support for Java database connectivity. WebServer includes a framework for building cartridges and linking databases with applications. It uses an Oracle Web Request Broker mechanism for performing persistent database transactions over the Web.
WebServer 2.1 for Solaris is out now - an NT version is due by year-end. WebServer 3.0 is expected to support a bracket set of transactions and distributed Webserver options.
In other areas, Oracle's created a Spatial Data Option which enabled Universal Server users to store geographical data in their databases and integrate it with other applications built upon Universal Server. The option ships in February.
Acorn Computer Group Plc and Cirrus Logic Inc are offering a reference design kit from which to build Internet devices. The pair say it's ideal for; set-top boxes, telephones, multimedia kiosks and obviously NCs. They'll look for OEMs for the kit, which is based on Acorn's RISC OS and on Cirrus' WebSet version of an Advanced RISC Machines Ltd 32-bit RISC chip, the PS7500FE. Cirrus will also provide schematics and Acorn a bunch of browsers, e-mail and other applications.
AOL COMES CLEAN WITH HEAVY FIRST QUARTER LOSSES
America Online Inc came clean with its first quarter figures last week, which makes us wonder what the highly-paid and highly-regarded analysts on the Street have been doing for all these years, believing the company when it said that most subscribers stayed for at least two years.
For that was the reason behind the Dulles, Virginia on-line services company taking a previously-announced $385m write-off for deferred subscription acquisition costs, where it had previously capitalized the advertising costs over at least two years. The analysts' friend, the Wall Street Journal even gently put the boot in, noting that in taking the hit the company was "reducing to vapor what accountants Ernst & Young had certified as solid nine weeks earlier." The company is now taking all advertising costs as expenses.
As a result, first quarter net losses were $353.7m, up from losses of $10.9m last time, that included a $17.0m charge for acquired research and development, on revenues that were up 77% to $350.0m. Marketing spending increased in the quarter, ahead of its traditionally strong December and March quarters, when it's too cold to go outside too much. AOL added around 400,000 net new subscribers in the quarter, taking it to roughly 6.9m users worldwide. The average hourly usage came to 6.95 hours per member and hit its highest level ever in October, said the company.
The company's changing its model to rely less on subscribers, and introduced a flat $19.95 rate last week that takes affect next month though it warns that it "lacks historical experience with this pricing." There were no details as to what alternative higher-margin revenue streams the company is planning to get into, though electronic commerce is thought to be a central plank. Shares were down $1.125 at $24.00 before the numbers came out after the close yesterday. They have been as high as $71.00 in the last 12 months.
SPAMMERS LAUNCH ANTI-TRUST SUIT AGAINST AOL
Just days after losing a First Amendment appeal to prevent America Online Inc from blocking its mass e-mailings, Philadelphia's Cyber Promotions Inc is again seeking a court restraining order against America, this time under federal antitrust laws.
Cyber Promotions' resident, Sanford Wallace, claims that AOL is blocking Cyber Promotions email "for the purpose of monopolizing electronic advertising to AOL customers". He accuses the service provider of being "hypocritical" and "anti-competitive", since AOL engages in direct mail campaigns of its own. America Online recently introduced technology, called PreferredMail that, allows customers to choose whether or not they can receive junk mail.
Cyber Promotions complains that PreferredMail automatically blocks its mailings and makes it too complicated for customers to choose to receive blocked email. Wallace says his company would be happy if PreferredMail would default to allow mass mailings rather than to block them. He adds that there is also "a good likelihood" that Cyber Promotions will appeal its First Amendment case. AOL could not be reached for comment.
NOW DEC OFFLOADS MAILWORKS E-MAIL TO I/G OPENWARE
Digital Equipment Corp has inked a deal with I/G OpenWare Inc of West Chester, Pennsylvania, that offloads the continued development, marketing and support of the MailWorks electronic messaging technology on non-DEC Unix platforms.
MailWorks - an evolution of DEC's original proprietary All-in-1 mail system - is an electronic messaging server that's scalable to large systems, and supports SMTP, MIME, X.400 and X.500 standards amongst others, and can work with MAPI-compliant clients such as Microsoft Exchange and POP3 clients such as Netscape mail, Motif and DEC's own TeamLinks Mail.
I/G OpenWare plans ports to IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and SCO Unix, with IBM first in the queue, scheduled for March 1997. DEC will continue to develop the product for its own Digital Unix platforms and retains the MailWorks trademark rights.
US ROBOTICS BOUNCES BACK FUELLED BY INTERNET ACCESS
US Robotics Corp hit back with year-end figures suggesting that last year's slip was just temporary. The Skokie, Illinois networking hardware and modem manufacturer turned in end of year net profits up 158% on last year, at $170.0m, as revenues rose 122% to $1.98bn.
The company also announced job losses of "around 200, but less than 300," - it wouldn't be more specific - as it did some pruning after taking on "more than 3,000" people just in the last twelve months, more than doubling its workforce to around 6,000. US Robotics took a $54m hit in the fourth quarter relating to the acquisition of Scorpio Communications Ltd, and last year's numbers included a $29.5m merger-related hit. It said it saw demand growing across its entire range, with the Internet, not surprisingly, the principal growth factor. But it did point to its Total Control wide area network hub products as being particularly strong, with sales of around $400m in the fiscal just ended.
Fourth quarter net profits were down 61% at $13.5m, after the $54.0m hit, on revenues that were up 108% at $611.4m. Gross margins for the quarter were 41.9%, the same as the previous one. The margins in the desktop modem and PC Card businesses fell as prices eroded, but this was offset by an increase in higher-margin systems products revenues as a percentage of the total, said the company.
The acquisition of Scorpio Technologies Ltd took USR into the Asynchronous Transfer Mode business, and this, and the development of the x2 56Kbps modem technology, will be an important part of its business in the next few years (OR 21), and the systems products will increase as a percentage of sales over the same period, said the company. It warned that sales and marketing expenses are likely to rise in the first half of the current fiscal due to the launch of 56Kbps modem products and other new technologies, and therefore margins are likely to be slightly less than those just reported. www.usr.com
INNOTECH HOPES TO IMPROVE SEARCH RESULTS WITH NETRESULTS
Innotech Multimedia Corp is introducing a Web site indexing and retrieval toolset written in Java called NetResults, for what it reckons is a fraction of the cost of rival offerings. The North York, Ontario-based company that started life eight years ago as a network integrator and has also branched out into so-called edutainment CD-ROM publishing, is getting into another new area with NetResults.
Innotech reckons the main difference, apart form the price and the fact that it's written in Java, is the NetResults cascading capability, whereby visitors to a site can search across multiple servers with one search and can display the search findings in various ways, including histograms. The suite comprises an indexing tool, the search engine and some related Java applets.
Innotech vice president Simon Arnison reckons the company's estimate of selling 500 copies by the year-end is conservative and he says fellow-Canadian Corel Corp is looking at the stuff. NetResults is available now for Windows 95 and NT $2,000. It's only available from the Web site right now until more conventional channels are set up. www.netresults-search.com
PointCast Inc's business model is changing again, and it is now planning to use the Teletext concept to deliver news to users not connected to the Internet. It's recent deal with WavePhore Inc (OR No 23) will see it inserterting its material into the vertical blanking interval of more than 250 Public Television Service stations US-wide. By broadcasting its data via the television signal, says Inter@ctive Week, PointCast will be able to sidestep the problems it has hit in clogging corporate data networks, and becomes viable for residential users that do not want to use their telephone lines to handle PointCast's frequent sorties to the Internet to retrieve news. Intel Corp's Intercast receiver, already included in some multimedia computers, will be needed to capture the broadcast data. www.pointcast.com
ACTIVE GROUP IN LIMBO, OPEN GROUP DEFERS ITS BLESSING
by Maureen O'Gara
Sun's prophecy proved dead on. (Actually, Sun's political agitation - and IBM's too, we hear - made it a self-fulfilling prophecy but anyway....) Sun said before the Open Group board convened on Friday November 1 that the board - where Sun and IBM sit along with 14 other vendors - would defer sanctioning Microsoft's proposed Active Group "independent standards body" scheme by deferring its sanction of Microsoft's first Pre-Structured Technology joint development submission - and it did.
To hear Sun tell it, the board didn't even bother to vote. It was "unanimous" in its decision that it hadn't enough data to extend its hands in blessing and withdrew the vote. (This is the self-same board that back in September had on short order unanimously voted to give this Active Group thing a try.) Like multiple agendas, there are several threads to this tale and of course it's being played out against a backdrop of intense and prejudiced competition.
First off, sources say that Microsoft's interests were ill-served by the "giddy, gushing" fawning of the Open Group staff which, in attempting to persuade the various board members to vote "aye" - and hence invest the Open Group itself with some relevance - misrepresented a host of issues to them as being resolved that weren't. Once the board realized it was being hornswoggled, it reportedly lashed back by deferring its decision. Certain members of the Open Group board, who are also sensitive to the amount of PR Microsoft has managed to derive from this thing so far, are reportedly ticked off with the Open Group people for not acting in what they consider to be the best interests of the organization and there is now said to be "bad blood" between them. Microsoft wasn't blamed for taking advantage of the situation but the board or factions on it reportedly bridled at the attempt to "ram it through"..."with no concessions to standards practices."
REMAINING ISSUES
Open Group managers have slunk into the woodwork as far as we're concerned. No one from the top down returned calls despite promises that they would and their lady press agent was doing her best at spin control. The issues that remain, according to Open Group board members like Sun and IBM, are such substantive little items as whether Redmond intends Open Group's X/Open arm to drive ActiveX (or whatever's actually on the table) into a standard (which is what this whole thing's supposed to be about) and how licensing is supposed to work. There is also the little matter of ActiveX or DCOM interoperability with the Object Management Group's rival Corba scheme, which is dear to the hearts of many on the board, not to speak of the process-busting way Microsoft and the Open Group went about setting up the Active Group to begin with: PSTs are supposed to emanate from Open Group's technical managers, who are all from vendor firms, by the way, not come handed down from on high along with the novelty of a Steering Committee hand-picked by Microsoft.
Sun refused to be drawn on how it really feels about the Steering Committee, but - lest we guess - it did venture to say that the board would "keep voting [the proposal] down until Microsoft learned to play by the same rules as everyone else." Sun said Microsoft has until the next board meeting in Rome on December 12 to clarify its positions.
Microsoft, meanwhile, despite rumors that it was canceled, held the first meeting of the Steering Committee last Thursday November 7 in Long Beach, California where it was having its Professional Developers Conference. A second meeting is reportedly supposed to be held this week. The committee includes Microsoft, DEC, HP, SAP, Siemens Nixdorf, Software AG, Sybase's Powersoft unit, CA, NCR, Lotus, Adobe, Borland, VideoSoft, Wall Data and Sheridan Systems. (IBM thought it was awfully funny to have an advisory meeting scheduled after the fact but, hey, this is high tech. It not only sent a Lotus guy along but somebody from Armonk, we hear.)
Reports from the meeting say HP's Object Group board member told it the PST would "absolutely" pass on December 12. Microsoft needs a majority of nine of 16 votes to establish both the PST and formalize the Active Group. Microsoft last week showed no signs of picking up its toys and going home. Criticisms were rampant - even among Microsoft's friends - about the thrown-together nature of the PST. One friend said it looked like "high school" work.
Microsoft's johnny-on-the-spot Cornelius Willis claimed, however, that "it was more complete and more thorough than any other PST they've even had" and took a detached position about clearing up any lingering questions from the board. Open Group people are talking to the board's staff people, he said, indicating that Microsoft itself itself wasn't going to supply any more data 'cause it was already all there.
A Steering Committee member, however, said that the Open Group is rewriting the PST and that there is now an authoring group as is usual in Open Group PSTs. Willis repeatedly cited the public record created for the Active Group kickoff meeting October 1 to rebuff criticisms and claimed, for instance, that the licensing terms were all completely spelled out there.
Perhaps because of the shoddiness of the draft submitted to the board there is a good deal of (honest?) confusion about what the PST says even among those who claim to have read the confidential document. One said it sought to replace the MS/RPC, which is already based on the DCE RPC, with the DCE RPC with Microsoft extensions. (Got that?) Willis, who said he had not seen the document, however, said "No, that's not true." That that was an eventual intent but that it was too soon and that the immediate point was to license ActiveX on Unix - still apparently a blending of Software AG's DCOM on Unix port with DEC's DCE - and make DCE security an ActiveX option.
CORBA CHAOS
IBM, however, claims it seeks to reinvent server interaction that already exists in DCE and Corba. Again the touchy subject of Corba, ActiveX' deadly enemy. Willis claimed that just as soon as this PST business is resolved and the Active Group is up and running - not before like some on the board seem to want - that Microsoft would be willing to come to grips with Corba provided the Corba contingent tells it which part of the "fragmented chaos that is Corba" it is supposed to address. Corba is a spec not source code like Microsoft is providing, Willis went on, and there are 15 implementations of the thing and they're all different.
The unaccommodating Mr Willis also denied that his chief Paul Maritz has had a proposal from the OMG on his desk for the last few weeks, as OMG told us, and said all that was there was the message "Let's talk."
Bogey men could easily be read into this since Microsoft's ole buddy DEC reportedly had a hand in preparing the PST and the whole thing calls to mind the battle royal that raged back in late 1994 - that DEC lost - over which object request broker should be mandated for Corba 2 interoperability between ORBs: the Sun-backed TCP/IP-based Universal Network Objects (UNO) protocol or the DEC/HP-driven DCE-based Common InterORB Protocol.
The defeat was seen at the time as a serious political loss for Microsoft and COM and DEC swore its alternative would become the de facto standard no matter what. No matter what anyone says the PST is about, we suspect it's a fight for control of the infrastructure and he who controls the infrastructure wins.
GERMAN INSTITUTE PUTS NEURAL NETWORK OPTIONS ON THE NET
Institut fur Neuroinformatik has a Java programme that reportedly allows engineers to create and train neural networks using either the popular back-propagation-of-errors learning method or by growing a unique neural architecture specifically adapted to an application.
A fully programmed neural-network demonstration can be downloaded from its web site:.http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-unibochum.de/ini/VDM/research/gsn/DmoGNG/GNG.html. Electronic Engineering Times reports most neural-network learning algorithms force the engineer to choose a particular network topology ahead of time which means the developer must choose between rival approaches to learning before they understand the advantages and disadvantages of each.
The Institute's work is focused on automatically growing a network topology that is perfect for a particular application.
HITACHI, ACER DO INTERNET TERMINALS, INTELEVISION
Acer Inc is becoming a pivotal company in the industry and is increasingly the first port of call for both the Japanese and the US majors when they are seeking an off-shore partner. Now the Taiwanese company has bought a 15% stake in Hitachi Television (Taiwan) Ltd from Hitachi Ltd for $1.8m to seal a deal under which the two will jointly develop and market information products aimed at the consumer market.
Acer and Hitachi will co-operate in areas such as Internet terminals and personal computer-ready television sets. Acer, now the world's seventh-biggest computer maker, already manufactures personal computers on an OEM basis for Hitachi.
CISCO WINS SUPPORT FOR "TAG" IP SWITCHING
Cisco has lined up ten companies that are to work with the San Jose, California-based company in developing its Tag Switching technology. According to Cisco, the ten will work with it to define Tag Switching as an open standard set of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards for scaling the networks for Internet and large corporate intranets.
Tag Switching is Cisco's own version of IP Switching - a technology creating a lot of interest which switches IP traffic over Aynchronous Transfer Mode hardware (CI No 3,008). Rival vendors such as NEC, Fore Systems and DEC have signed to take IP Switching from Ipsilon the company that first developed the technology (CI No 2,923). Another, Bay Networks has announced its own IP Switching technology.
Cisco submitted draft specifications for Tag Switching to the IETF in September. The new group will discuss the specifications as submitted and establish an IETF working group. The ten companies joining Cisco are Optical Data Systems Inc, Whitetree Inc, Adaptec Inc Efficient Networks Inc, Olicom, Net2Net Corp, Network General Corp, Radcom Limited, AG Communication Systems and NUKO Information Systems Inc.
Cisco says that Tag Switching running on its Cisco 7500 series routers and its Lightstream 1010 campus ATM switches will be available in for field trials in the first half of 1997. Versions for the Cisco StrataCom BPX wide area ATM switch are expected to become available later in 1997.
CISCO DOESN'T ALLOW ITS ACQUISITIONS TO SLOW THE PACE
After its $4.1bn acquisition of Stratacom Inc, network switch supplier Cisco Systems Inc looks almost invincible in its position as the number one supplier of corporate networking equipment and its first quarter numbers show it is still very much the one to catch.
Revenue was $1.43bn, up 80% on the same period last year; net income was down slightly at $180.9m after a one-time charge of $174.6m for writing down research and development costs associated with its Telebit Corp acquisition, and a gain of $55.1m on the sale of a minority stock holding. Earnings per share were $0.26. Excluding the charge and gain, net income would have been $320.8m, or $0.47 per share, just ahead of First Call's $0.46 average of analysts' estimates.
Following its Stratacom, Granite Systems (for gigabit Ethernet), Nashoba Networks (Token Ring) and Telebit (ISDN modems) purchases - and pending acquisition of Netsys Technologies (for network modeling) - Cisco finds itself in the position of dominating two interlinked markets which are exploding. Routers are required not only as one of the essential building blocks of the internet, but also for building internal intranets.
It is difficult to see any threat to Cisco at present. The internet and the intranet markets are both expected to show high growth rates for the next several years, with overall networking products expected to show between 30% and 50% a year growth. And while rivals such as Bay Networks and 3Com are growing fast, and in some areas have highly competitive products, they are not catching up. Cisco shares closed up $1.12 at $63.75 on the day but dropped back slightly in after hours trading following the release of its Q1 figures.
CISCO BOOSTS ITS PIX FIREWALL OFFERING WITH INTERNET ACCESS
Cisco Systems Inc has added Cut-Through Proxy to its Cisco PIX Firewall, an addition that, says the company, will boost the standalone hardware devices performance with Internet and intranet access.
Cut-Through Proxy technology, increases the speed of security verification in a network by reducing the network overhead associated with UNIX-based proxy server firewalls, says the Santa Clara, California-based company.
Cisco's Cut-Through Proxy authenticates users at the application layer like a proxy server, but once the user is authenticated, the Cisco PIX Firewall shifts the session flow, establishing a direct link between the source and destination while maintaining session state information. This capability provides faster network performance without sacrificing the security of the network, says Cisco.
This provides faster network throughput and minimises network bottlenecks while protecting networks from outside intrusion. Additionally, Cut-Through Proxy offers enhanced user authentication capabilities through streamlined verification of authorised network users. Software upgrades are available at no additional charge for all customers of Cisco's SmartNet program, Cisco's technical support service.
BANYAN CUTS WORKFORCE AND CLOSES SOME FACILITIES
Banyan Systems Inc, of Westborough, Massachusetts warns that it expects to record a pre-tax charge of between $3m and $5m in the current quarter to cover the cost of an executive management realignment and corporate restructuring. It is cutting about 100 jobs, 15% of the workforce and closing some facilities. The company is also looking for a new chief executive after David Mahoney, who has been chairman, president and CEO was shunted aside to the post of vice-chairman. Jeffrey Glidden, senior vice-president and chief financial officer since 1991, is acting president and CEO.
Banyan also plans a substantial reduction in its worldwide channel inventories, and expects to decrease product ships to resellers by about $7m to $10m, leading to lower turnover and a loss for the current quarter. It also expects to take a non-cash charge for previously-recorded deferred tax assets against fourth quarter figures.
With the decline in its network operating system business, Banyan has not exactly been prospering for some time, and a year ago, it recorded a fourth quarter loss of $17.3m or $1.03 a share, and that included restructuring charges of $11.1m, or 66 cents a share.
VISIGENIC TOUTS "OPEN FORTE" ARCHITECTURE
Visigenic Software Inc opened for business in Europe last week with founder and chairman Roger Sippl describing his company's collection of database access and object messaging technologies as "an open architecture version of Forte," the eponymous three-tier application development architecture.
Like other object request broker vendors now supplying technology to large-scale application development projects, Sippl says customers want the scalability ORBs can offer without the proprietary 4GL programming language and forms model that Forte and others enforce. Sippl says he'll supply database transparency (its ODBC products) and object messaging (VisiBroker) and let users choose their own programming languages and forms package.
Sippl also looks forward to tapping the 20m-odd Netscape Communicator clients that will be using run-time versions of the Visigenic VisiBroker request broker for accessing Corba objects from their Web browsers.
Although these aren't development installations, Sippl nevertheless believes that Visigenic will be able to sell ORB monitoring tools to Webmasters and expects to offer a set of tools for redeploying Corba applications on to the Web, or beyond the intranet, as well as a set of Corba services which developers can plug-in to their applications, presumably to provide security, transaction processing and other connectivity options. Some are in beta right now and will be out next quarter.
Sippl reckons object wars should be avoided at all costs and is ready and willing to tell Microsoft his Corba story if Microsoft would just let him, but of course it won't right now. Visigenic, like so many other companies whose allegiance lies with the Object Management Group's Corba, was not invited to the Active Group meeting in New York last month - a decision he called "foolish" - and Sippl reckons Microsoft is just "fighting with their imagination."
Iona
Visigenic's VisiBroker for ActiveX Bridge currently provides one-way access to Corba or ActiveX stored objects on Corba or DCOM servers from C++ or Visual Basic Windows client applications over IIOP on the wire (OR 23). Bi-directional links are due in February.
While not out to knock Visigenic's product - the ORB vendors are keen to grow the Corba market in all directions - Dublin-based rival Iona Technologies Ltd says it's been delivering this functionality in its Orbix request broker since the summer. Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) is only available in a beta form in NT shipments. Iona expects the spec to change before production ships begin which is why it and other Corba ORB vendors are not currently supporting DCOM protocols at the wire level. Visigenic, Iona and others will be submitting DCOM-to-Corba mapping technologies to Part B of Object Management Group's Corba-to-COM specification programme.
Visigenic responds to Iona's claims by trumpeting what it believes are its firsts - to Java, to a Java ORB on the server and to IIOP. Rather than wait for Microsoft's adoption of IIOP, Sippl believes a class of Universal ORBs will emerge which provide multi-platform messaging while hiding the underlying object model, like the multiple database connections ODBC has enabled.
Visigenic has opened an office in Paris, and will open others in the UK and Germany shortly. Netscape, Platinum Technology Inc and Cisco Systems Inc paid $8m between for a total stake of less than 10% in Visigenic last June. Netscape recently announced the inclusion of Visigenic's VisiBroker for Java in its Communicator client stuff (OR 21). Sippl said Platinum is eyeing the ORB technology for use in its systems administration software tools, having put the ODBC drivers in virtually all its software already.
Cisco's take-up of Visigenic technology seems dependent on the success of the Corba Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). If it takes off, the Cisco would be interested in anything that's necessary to handle the network traffic, such as VisiBroker. Visigenic went public in August, and is not expected to reach profitability until its third, December quarter of 1998, according to First Call estimates.
MITSUBISHI, INTERTRUST LAUNCH E-COMMERCE CONSORTIUM
Mitsubishi Corp is teaming with Sunnyvale, California-based InterTrust Technologies Corp to develop a secure electronic commerce standard.
InterTrust has developed the InterTrust Commerce Architecture which is a general purpose commerce and rights management architecture. Right now there's only the two of them in the consortium, but more announcements can be expected in the next few weeks, according to David Van Wie, InterTrust's senior VP research. Softbank Net Solutions, which is already an InterTrust partner elsewhere, is also said to be interested in joining.
Six-year-old InterTrust makes its money at the moment by selling a so-called System Development Kit, which comprises an Internet commerce software node and a bunch of back-office technologies to support it, principally a financial and a usage clearing house system. The former does the financial settlements, and the latter tracks usage and collates information on intellectual property
rights and such. The company has secure software container technology called DigiBox, which is used to house business rules, and any kind of digital content, and these are the things that are transferred between the electronic commerce consumer and vendors. www.intertrust.com
WEBFLOW CONTINUES WITH SECOND CUT OF SAMEPAGE
WebFlow Corp will this week introduce the second cut of its SamePage suite of Web-based collaborative workflow applications.
There are two applications in the suite, SamePage Workspace and Take Action! The Santa Clara, California company says differences this time round in Take Action! are tiered tasking, which means tasks can be sub-divided, the change in the reports section so that it can now be configured by pointing and clicking and the whole thing is now customizable to suit a company's particular project.
In the SamePage Workspace application, support for other types of media have been added, multiple authors can now work on the same document, and documents can be split into chapters for faster download, claims the company. It supports various e-mail systems including Microsoft Mail, cc:Mail, SMTP and POP3 on Windows NT only.
SamePage is used by Sun Microsystems Inc's SMCC and JavaSoft Inc divisions, the latter using it to control the licensing of Java through its Web page and SMCC uses it for controlling new product development.
Next up for WebFlow is Java and ActiveX support in May next year and APIs so the software can be expanded. Also planned are project management and meeting modules. WebFlow closed second round funding of $10m last month, to add to the $4.3m it got earlier this year. SamePage 2.0 is out this week, up on Solaris, SGI Irix and Windows NT, and client access is through Internet Explorer or Navigator. www.webflow.com
MILLENIA LETS YOU CHECK YOUR E-MAIL OVER THE PHONE
Millennia Software Inc, a private and AT&T-funded Internet start-up has rolled out Email Reader 1.0, a voice activated e-mail retrieval system.
The Saratoga, California company claims users can call their PCs from any telephone and retrieve their e-mail messages. It's based on AT&T Watson voice processing technology and Millennia's voiceLink engine. It requires a Pentium PC, Windows 95, a TAPI- compliant voice modem and retrieves Netscape, Eudora, POP3, and Microsoft Exchange e-mail. It costs $90. www.msw.com
BULLETPROOF FIRES OFF ITS FOURTH JDESIGNERPRO ROUND
BulletProof Corp has announced the 1.4 cut of its jDesignerPro Java development environment, geared for database applications and deployment. It includes all the usual components and database connectivity, and this time has added a project management feature, with each developers' name, progress and status shown, as well as the ability to change code inside the building environment, rather than having to alter the code once it is built, as was the case with 1.3.
BulletProof says it's not up against Symantec Corp or Borland International Inc in the Java development space, as the Los Gatos, California company sees its strength in the deployment of Java applets, rather than just the building of them. The first cut only came out in August. jDesignerPro 1.4 costs $99 for ten users through Thanksgiving, when the price will go up slightly; $1,000 buys a 200-user license, $2,500 a license for 500 users. www.bulletproof.com
FREE INTERNET CONNECTION: $29.95 + STRINGS
If you live in the Bay Area, you can now get what Hyper Net USA is billing as "free Internet services for Bay Area residents and businesses" who do not mind having 3"x1" ads running down just outside of their browsers as they surf.
Of course this "free" service does have a $30 sign-up fee. And users must fill out a 30-40 question marketing survey. Users must also complete additional marketing surveys, "every now and then", according to Hyper Net president Jay Shah.
The service may not be around for ever, though. Singh says Hyper Net will be evaluating how the service, which has over 116,000 subscribers in Japan, flies in the US over the next six months and will continue with it, "if we can make it profitable," after which, who knows?. www.hypernet.co.jp/
HP READY WITH WEB PRINTER MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Hewlett-Packard Co's Internet Solutions Operation has launched the Web version of its JetAdmin printer management software for managing printers from a Web browser (OR 8).
Web JetAdmin can manage all HP printers and any printer connected to a HP JetDirect EX print server. It doesn't need any special firmware embedded in the printer, according to HP. Web JetAdmin enables a user to set up a custom map of their office, displaying the location of each printer and any landmarks the user wishes to add to help identify the printers. The icons change color depending on the status of the printer, and being accessible through a browser means that the user doesn't need to be physically in the office. There are three levels of security: Web JetAdmin access, device groups and individual devices. Web JetAdmin is up at www.hp.com for free, supporting HP-UX, Sun Solaris, SunOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, with backwards compatibility to version 3.51, NetWare and OS/2 Warp and Server
ICHAT TO HAVE AVATARS, NETGRAVITY ADVERTISING
Ichat Inc is adding a variety of features to its Rooms chat software including Internet Relay Chat (IRC) support, avatars, VRML navigation and the ability to drag and drop files or URLs into chat sessions.
Rooms 2.2 will also ship with something called a "BOT API", which lets administrators create an automated robot to provide help during chat sessions. It can do things like change naughty words to characters (@#!!%!) and kick unruly chatters off the site. Ichat has written Windows 3.1 and Java versions of its Rooms clients and inked partnering deals to enable Rooms site administrators to dish up advertising from a NetGravity server and audit advertising using I/Pro's advertising auditing services.
Ichat says future releases of Rooms will have conferencing and APIs that allow for more customization on the server side. Rooms 2.2 will cost the same as 2.0 - starting at $1,000 for 25 users. It's expected to be announced this week. www.ichat.com
INFOGEAR READY WITH THE IPHONE INTERNET TELEPHONE
There is definitely a market at the right price for a simple telephone that includes enough of a processor to run Internet phone software and little else, but InfoGear Technology Corp of Redwood City, California has gone rather further.
According to PC Week, the iPhone Internet Telephone will provide an ordinary telephone coupled with a proprietary graphical World Wide Web interface and functions such as electronic mail, on-line directories, electronic commerce and telecommunications services.
The initial version, to be manufactured by Cidco Inc under a non-exclusive agreement, will include a 14.4Kbps modem, keyboard and small 16-shade monochrome screen, and sell for under $500.
Future models will go to 28.8Kbps and ISDN and include a colour screen, and InfoGear reckons there is also a market for cellular and other wireless models, and a PABX-compatible version. InfoGear says it is in discussions with three phone companies to bundle the phones with telecommunications services such as Internet access, Caller ID and voice mail.
The race between coverage on the Internet versus the television was closer than the one that mattered, reports Reuter. The first US presidential election since the invention of the Web was a test that the net had trouble keeping up with. The in-depth information was sitting there, but users couldn't get access due to the sheer volume of traffic. And the TV networks were first to call a Clinton victory.
By 8am PST both Bill Clinton's www.cg96.org and Bob Dole's www.dole96.com were both busy, but tellingly that was not the case at Ross Perot's www.perot.org. There was no live news at Perot's site but a plea to "Make History Tuesday," by giving the Reform Party 25% of the vote, thus securing him federal funding on a par with the other two parties. By about midday the Clinton site was displaying a sort of cyber-bumper sticker saying merely "I Voted Election 96" that users could smugly paste on their personal Web pages.
LYNXOS TO FEATURE SPYGLASS SOFTWARE DEVELOPER KIT
Spyglass Inc continues its campaign to license its browsing technology to everyone and anyone in the embedded market. This week, it is expected to announce a deal with Lynx Real-Time Systems to incorporate Spyglass's client SDK into LynxOS, which is also picking up the Java run-time environment.
Last week, Scientific-Atlanta Inc's PowerTV Inc licensed Spyglass Inc's client SDK technology to adapt the PowerTV operating system for the Web. PowerTV's set-top box system is currently being used in trials by BellSouth Corp and Pacific Telesis Group Inc. Spyglass has recently inked similar deals with ISI, Microware, Bandai and QNX (OR 22). www.spyglass.com
PILOT'S WEB READER IN BETA
Pilot Software Inc's Internet Publisher add-on to its on-line analytical processing Decision Support Suite Version 5 has now gone into beta testing, for general availability in the first quarter of next year. Web browsers for the front-end client systems make it more cost-effective for occasional users to access information from adata warehouse, says Pilot.
Using Active X or Java controls, browser users can gain access to dynamic rather than static information, using simplified versions of the query facilities available on Pilot's full-blown client front-end. A "personal cube" feature allows for the replication of relevant data to field sales people using laptops for off-line analysis. Pricing begins at $10,000 per server, with no user limits. Pilot's Decision Support Suite runs on Unix and Windows NT servers, with Windows 3.1 and 95, NT and now Netscape Navigator or Windows Explorer clients.
DOT Gossip
With Microsoft Stock passing the $143.5 level last week, Bill Gates is now worth a shade over $20bn, which is a rise of almost $7bn from a year ago.
NetObjects Inc Fusion for the Mac is released today, Monday (OR 23) and the company will also announce new distribution deals with Apple and AT&T via their Web sites. www.netobjects.com
AltaVista Technology (AVT) says it's "surprised" by the lawsuit filed by DEC over the alleged misuse of DEC's AltaVista trademark on www.altavista.com (OR 23). AVT says it had been in discussions with DEC on how to resolve the issue. The AVT site late last week continued to feature a "Search with Digital's Alta Vista" option that looked a little familiar. The little-known email software developer won't say how many hits it's getting.
Reuters reports that Rupert Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting and Australia's OzEmail will announce a joint venture to distribute advertising to servers around the world via the Web. Details on the technology, developed by OzEmail, and the company's strategy are expected to be announced on December 3 in New York.
The SunRiver Group, which owns 50% of SunRiver Corp, is trying to oust SunRiver Corp's chief executive Gerald Youngblood, take over the board and make other changes at the company and its Internet software subsidiary TradeWave Corp, hears our sister paper ClieNT Server News. SunRiver's other subsidiary is Boundless Corp, a Citrix licensee and maker of network computers, which hopes to springboard off of TradeWave's business.
HP's Java-enabled HP-UX with an SDK and VM, available now at www.hp.com/go/JAVA
Sun Microsystems Inc does not have a conscientious objection to including disks on a network computer and Ed Zander, president of SMCC said in Brussels last week that the company may in the future ship a version of its JavaStation with a hard disk. "In a short time it will have Flash RAM capability and Just-In-Time chip set compilers," he said. "There is an opportunity longer term to see if we can put in a hard disk." He added that the feedback after the JavaStation launch went against making the machine more complex.
Acer Inc has bought a 15% stake in Hitachi Television (Taiwan) Ltd from Hitachi Ltd for $1.8m to seal a deal under which the two will jointly develop and market information products aimed at the consumer market. Acer and Hitachi will co-operate in areas such as Internet terminals and PC-ready televisions. Acer, already manufactures PCs on an OEM basis for Hitachi.
Intel Corp's Java media components, Realistic Sound eXperience (RSX) and Realistic Display miXer (RDX) will be part of Microsoft Corp's third party program, Gallery for Java.
Former Lotus VP Don Bulens is being sued for an unspecified amount by IBM Lotus for allegedly luring an un-named former Lotus salesperson to his Radnet Inc start-up. Bulens claims that Lotus is picking on him because it can't compete on the Internet. Lotus admits it's trying to stop further solicitation and recruitment, but scoffs at Bulens's suggestion that it is singling out Radnet because of competitive pressures.
Sunnyvale-based Global Village Communications Inc announced plans to offer its first modem product for the Windows market. The TelePort 33.6 Speakerphone modem for Windows is designed to give customers a high-speed modem combined with a professional-quality, stand-alone speakerphone. It can operate whether the computer is on or off; it should cost about $240. www.globalvillage.com
IBM Corp is planning a set of electronic commerce announcements this Tuesday in New York for various vertical markets
Netscape says it wants the $90m or so it will raise from its share issue to acquire additional office space and to make building improvements. Some of the money may be used to invest in other companies and some proceeds may also be used to buy or invest in businesses, products or to buy rights to technologies, although it doesn't presently have any plans or agreements.
Matsushita's Panasonic and Proxima are using Diba Inc's reference designs as the basis for new Internet appliances. At Comdex Fall, Panasonic will show a Diba-derived Internet telephone and Proxima an Internet-enabled multimedia projector.
Microsoft's the latest to license Object Design Inc's skinny ObjectStore PSE for Java database. It's using it to provide persistence storage for its Java SDK which will enable users to download Java applets, change them, then store the applets and changes.
An Oracle database written in Java? Oracle SVP Object, Internet and Groupware Tools Joseph Duncan says Java is being integrated into Oracle's database products and he would not rule out the possibility of Oracle re-writing its database in Java. "If you were to re-write the database, the obvious choice would be Java, Java is the language of the second half of the 90's. It will play the role that C played in this next era". Oracle says Java will be in the database in the first half of 1997.
A demo of Sanga Corp's Sanga Pages will be added to the software bundled with Sun's Netra j Java servers from December (OR 23).
Apple Computer Inc released a beta of version 1.0 of the Mac OS Runtime for Java, an implentation of the Java virtual machine and run-time environment. Mac developers can now create Java applets and embed Java functionality into PowerPC and 68000 code. It's free at www.devtools.apple/com/mrj.
Another Internet casino is about to deal its first hand at www.gamblenet.com. Operated by Grenada-based Sports International Ltd and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Interactive Gaming & Communications Corp, gamblenet is currently in beta, offering demos of blackjack and slot machines. An account must be established with Sports International, which already offers sports betting via the Internet, and the server is situated in Grenada in order to operate within that country's gaming laws. The full Casino will be operational within 60 days, IGC said.
Japan Computer Corp is selling its iBOX Home Internet terminals for home use, at about 100 Sunkus & Associates Inc. convenience stores in the Tokyo area. Regular retail price for the terminals is 50,000-60,000 yen ($450-$540), but 100 will be discounted to 19,800 yen ($175) to test market reaction. The initial target was 110,000 terminals, only 15,000-16,000 terminals have been sold.
Oh, and JavaSoft's working up a complete Java branding programme that it doesn't want to tell anyone about yet.
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