BackWeb's vision is to provide organizations with Internet
Communication Infrastructure and Applications software to
enable them to communicate business-critical, time-sensitive
information throughout their extended enterprise of
customers, partners and employees.
About BackWeb
BackWeb Technologies is a leading provider of Internet
Communication Infrastructure and Applications that enable
companies to manage the delivery of time-sensitive,
business-critical information to the extended enterprise.
Corporations such as Cisco, Compaq, Schlumberger Dowell,
Rite Aid and other Global 2000 companies have deployed
BackWeb's Internet Communication Infrastructure and
Applications for key business operations including sales,
customer service, competitive intelligence and software
distribution.
Enterprises are currently using BackWeb to deliver solutions
to their sales chain, consisting of employees, partners and
customers, in the financial services, high-tech, retail, travel
and telecommunications industries.
Our products provide a scalable, automated and reliable
solution for intelligently communicating information using
available network bandwidth. This ensures that files and
information are delivered without causing a change in the
user's response time when working on other applications on
their desktop computer.
BackWeb's current release of its Internet Communication
Infrastructure software, BackWeb Foundation, enables the
network-sensitive delivery of any size or type of information.
This could include text, audio, video, software updates, or
other multimedia electronic data.
BackWeb also provides the tools to build applications on top
of the BackWeb Foundation. Internally, we have used our
products to build the first in a series of accelerator
applications, called the BackWeb Sales Accelerator. This
innovative application uses scalable, network-sensitive
automated delivery and alerting technologies to shorten the
response time of the sales chain to business-critical changes.
The alerting component can be accomplished in a number of
ways. Most notably is the "Flash" technology created in the
Strategic Publishing Manager module. This is designed to
capture the user's attention. It allows organizations to send
any type of data in a small multimedia display that pops up
on the users' desktop, regardless of the applications currently
in use. We are further developing the BackWeb Sales
Accelerator and are developing other accelerator applications
BackWeb Technologies is headquartered in San Jose,
California and Ramat-Gan, Israel, with offices in New York,
Chicago, Canada, France, Germany, The Netherlands,
Sweden, the United Kingdom and Japan.
History
BackWeb Technologies was founded by BRM Technologies
Ltd., Lior Hass and Iftah Sneh. BRM is also the co-founder
of Check Point™ – the leading firewall company – and one
of the most successful Internet companies.
BRM is an Israeli-based technology venture firm, which
focuses on establishing start-up companies in new emerging
markets. Development of the BackWeb product line was
started in February 1995.
Investors
BackWeb's investors include:
Merrill Lynch
Goldman Sachs
SoftBank Corporation
Trinity
Polaris
Broadview Partners
Evergreen
BRM
Intel
Nippon Investment and
Finance/Daiwa
GE Pension Trust
CDC Valeurs de
Croissance
Partners
BackWeb has partnered with some of the world's largest and
most respected organizations including:
Microsoft
Computer Associates
Intel
Lotus
Network Associates
NewsEdge Corporation
Hewlett-Packard
Sun Microsystems
Customers
BackWeb has a list of blue-chip customers. To see some of
the companies that are using BackWeb, click here.
Management Team
BackWeb's management team has a diverse set of
backgrounds from companies such as Oracle, Netscape, IBM
and Scitex. To review biographies of the management team,
click here.
Success Stories
BackWeb customers are everywhere. From the world of
high-tech to the financial arena, the travel industry, and
beyond. And although each BackWeb customer has a
slightly different story to tell – with its own challenges and
business requirements – you'll hear the same message
coming through loud and clear.
BackWeb delivers.
The Return on Investment (ROI) is dramatic: a quicker
response to changes in the market – and within your own
company. Improved communications with your sales force,
business partners, and customers. A faster time to market. A
boost in customer satisfaction. Significant savings in
operating costs. A stronger ability to compete.
"We needed a way to get important messages across to
staff and give them more impact than we could with
e-mail."
-Richard Freemantle, European Vice President
Cisco Systems
"We anticipate that Compaq Service Connection
[application built with BackWeb] will save us $2
million in 1998."
Geraldine Rossiter, Manager for Presario
Service Product Marketing
Compaq Computer Corporation
Ottolenghi expects Carlson's BackWeb application to
boost future revenues by nine percent.
"Overall, this new system has given us a stronger
market position and made us into a better company."
Les Ottolenghi, Chief Information Officer
Carlson Wagonlit Travel
And the list goes on.
Some of our Customers:
Telecommunications
Financial Services
Pacific Bell
Goldman Sachs
AT&T
Fidelity Investments
Rogers Communications
Robertson Stephens
o.tel.o communications
Travel and Retail
High-Tech
Carlson Wagonlit Travel
Siemens
Rite Aid
Compaq
Computer Associates
Other Industries
Cisco Systems
ACNielsen
Gateway Computers
Schlumberger Dowell
Network Associates
Kaiser Permanente
Case Studies
Cisco Systems Inc.
Company
Cisco Systems Inc. manufactures and markets networking
hardware to businesses around the globe. Cisco now sells
nearly 75% of its products over the Internet.
Situation
Change is a way of life at Cisco Systems where a new
product is released every week, a new company acquired
every month, and the employee directory grows by 30%
every year. Cisco's European offices needed to ensure that
employees received and read corporate updates immediately
rather than putting them aside and missing important
business opportunities.
Business Solution
CiscoCast automatically delivers targeted multimedia
messages to 1,300 sales reps across Europe with details
about the California-based company's new products,
company acquisitions, and competitors' announcements.
Employees can "drill down" into the message for a text or
voice summary of the announcement or review the complete
announcement on the corporate intranet.
Results
BackWeb gives Cisco a competitive edge in the fast-moving
world of electronic commerce. Employees can respond
quickly to changes inside and outside of the company, and
bring new products to market faster.
CiscoCast hits the PC screen
E-Mail is a great way to, communicate with friends and
colleagues but too many messages can leave staff feeling
swamped with information. Time spent opening messages is
becoming a threat to productivity and important company
announcements can be lost among a fog of friendly greetings
and electronic chit-chat.
At the computer network company Cisco, a typical day's
work can be interrupted by up to 100 messages, each
demanding the time and attention of busy employees. Until
now, Cisco's staff have gone through a routine adopted by
millions of offices workers around the world: check the
e-mail, read the subject lines, open the interesting ones and
bin the rest.
But a new system being rolled out across Cisco's 20
European offices is about to change all that. The company is
using "push" technology to ensure it's messages make an
impact on all the right screens.
Called CiscoCast, the system was developed after an
important announcement from the company's chief
executive, John Chambers, had been missed by European
vice-president, Richard Freemantle.
"He asked me what I thought about it, but I had to admit I'd
just looked at the headline and thrown it away," Freemantle
explains.
The incident spurred Freemantle into investigating ways in
which Cisco could improve the process of communicating
with its staff. "What we needed was a way to get important
messages across to staff and give them a bit more impact
than we could with e-mail," he says.
Working in a company whose products are so intimately
associated with the Internet - Cisco claims it took orders
worth $3.6bn (£2.2bn) over the Net last year - Freemantle
was well aware of developments in push tech-nology.
Instead of having to navigate the chaos of the net to find
news, push technology allows people to specify what sort of
news they want and then delivers it to their desktops.
After evaluating several systems, including Pointcast, My
Yahoo and Internet Explorer 4, Freemantle's team decided to
base CiscoCast on Backweb client software, developed by
the company of the same name.
Backweb's internet effort organises news into different
channels, provided by companies such as ITV, 3Com, the
Belfast Telegraph and even Heineken. Users sign up for
particular channels and at regular intervals information is
downloaded into their computer, where the Backweb
software turns it into colourful messages on the screen.
What appealed to Freemantle was it's ability to handle more
than just text and graphics. "We wanted a tool that enabled
us to target an audience and introduce multimedia to give the
messages more impact," he says, nothing that messages with
text and voice proved to be especially popular in trials.
After a year of development and testing, CiscoCast has just
gone online to 20 offices and 1,300 staff in Europe. It will
roll out across the rest of the world later this year.
Installing the Backweb client software on so may computers
was an easier task than it seems, thanks to Microsoft's Server
Management Software, which distributed it to people's
desktops automatically. A couple of clicks was all it took
staff to get it up and running and a short welcome message
showed them how to tell CiscoCast about the sort of
company news they wanted to receive.
"Everyone who logs on has to tell the system who they are
and where they are," Freemantle says. Staff are given a
choice of categories of news, such as marketing, sales and
engineering and they can subscribe to as many as they like.
When news arrives, it is packaged into a box containing a
headline which slides on to the screen, over whatever else is
there. A second box scrolls upwards to meet it, and this
shows from which department the news is coming. Both
boxes are designed to fit in the Cisco's branding philosophy
and corporate colour schemes.
Users can either close the box to make the message go away
or click on the headline to go the second level, which is a
30-second "elevator pitch" that pops up from the headline
box. The pitch carries a neat summary of the story, in text or
voice, or both, as well as a link to the third level of the story
– the full works – which is carried on Cisco's intranet.
Freemantle says the system allows people to ignore messages
unless they are urgent or important. "As soon as you've
clicked on it, we know you've seen it because the BackWeb
server keeps statistics on who is looking at what and how
may levels they see. We're able to figure out what sort of
messages work best and how may times we have to push
them so they are assimilated. In the trials we found out that
text messages combined with voicemail worked well, as did
short video messages," says Freemantle.
This information, gained from trials in the UK, Denmark and
Sweden, has helped Freemantle's team develop an easy to
use authoring system for the people within Cisco who are
permitted to send out messages. These are what Freemantle
describes as "people at the top of the pyramid in a territory or
a division."
The authoring system takes them through a series of simple
steps, prompting them to think of a short, snappy headline
and assisting them with the key points for the pitch box. It
also asks them to specify whether the message is urgent,
confidential and what its useful life span is. This information
determines how the message appears on the screen and how
long it stays on the client computer before disappearing.
Freemantle says educating the providers of information was
the biggest challenge of implementing CiscoCast. "What we
needed to do was teach the people who generate information
that the audience is receiving too much already," he says.
"They have to pace the message they want to get across and
really think about they key message they are trying to
deliver."
Freemantle adds that not every manager can address the
whole company. People can send messages to their own
territories or divisions but they have to submit "general"
messages to an editor – usually in the marketing department
– with a good reason why it should appear on screens from
London to Los Angeles.
Because CiscoCast is intended as a way to broadcast
company messages, Freemantle says it is unlikely to be
linked with the company's existing email system. "That
would defeat the purpose," he says. But he regards,
CiscoCast as an improvement on e-mail, not just for its
attention-grabbing multimedia but also for its monitoring
capabilities. "When you send an e-mail you don't know
whether people have looked at it or what impact it has had.
With CiscoCast you do."
Freemantle believes the system could be extended beyond
broadcasting company messages to areas such as training and
technical support. Using Lotus ScreenCam, for example,
training staff can record what is happening on a computer
screen and talk staff through procedures such as opening files
or creating presentations. The "movie" they create can then
be sent out over the network as a memory jogger or a
training aid for coffee breaks.
With the ability to disseminate company messages so
quickly, Freemantle believes CiscoCast could give the
company a competitive edge in the fast-moving world of
internet technology.
"We release a product every week, buy a company every
month and add 30% more staff every year," he says. "That
presents the management with some unique challenges. Our
continued competitiveness depends on our ability to educate
the staff about these new developments so we can bring
Cisco's products to market faster than our competitors."
What's more, with Cisco's president able to record his
thoughts on video, and have them pop up on 12,000
computer screens a few minutes later, it's unlikely his
messages will be consigned to the bin without so much as a
look.
backweb.com |
