BWEB - I charted BWEB against its competition (ASWX, VITR, TIBX, MSTR) and like and was surprised by what I saw..since Sept 99, all have runnup more than 300%, except BWEB which has only run 38%...looks like loads of room for a substantial move (check the link below for chart)...also, great article on push technology and BWEB (posted the same post on K. Lees' board as well):
siliconinvestor.com
Backweb Technologies
NASDAQ: BWEB
Written 12/27/99:
Remember all the hype once surrounding push technology? It was only a couple of years ago that developers of "push client" software, most notably Pointcast, were all the rage, much in the same manner as B2B e-commerce facilitators and optical switch desginers are today. The concept had a strong allure to it: all you have to do is subscribe to a given "channel" that happens to pertain to a given type of information you're interested in, such as local weather reports or box scores on NBA games, and the information is automatically "pushed" to you with no action on your part other than to perhaps click a button for an update on all the channels you're subscribed to. The concept appeared interesting to me too, and I installed Pointcast's software to see what it was like.
However, as in the case of thousands of other individuals, it was less than a week before the software had been deleted from my hard drive. I quickly realized that I could access any of the generic content sent to me by Pointcast, or any other push client, by merely spending a couple of minutes scanning through links on a portal such as Yahoo! or Lycos. Meanwhile, doing the latter instead of the former would spare me the agonizingly long spans of time required to download the information I was looking for if I did so via a push client, not to mention the time spent scanning through information that I didn't want, but was sent to me nonetheless with a subscription to a given channel. Corporate IT departments weren't too thrilled with this software etther. In fact, the data traffic generated by push clients inundated corporate LANs to the point that, in many cases, companies were compelled to prohibit their use altogether. Thus Pointcast and its peers soon faded into oblivion, and push technology, along with Time Warner's doomed interactive TV effort, appeared set to go down as one of the greatest commercial disasters the IT industry would see during the '90s.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that automated content delivery does have its uses, and that's why companies such as Backweb are bringing push back from the dead, albeit in much different forms. One such use stems from the need for companies to instnataneously send to their employees, whether they happen to be in sales, engineering, or any other department, new information, such as facts on price changes, product specifications, meeting times, or anything else.
E-mail offers a partial solution to this, but it still requires action on the part of the end user, and thus doesn't instantaneously give him/her the needed information. Furthermore, e-mail can't be prioritized, thus a person may end up wading through a dozen pieces of spam before coming across an urgent message. Or even worse, sent into an evangelical frenzy to clear his/her mailbox of all clutter, the given person may delete the given message without reading it, assuming it to be unimportant. Backweb's software for businesses, known as Sales Accelerator and Serivce Acceleraor, provide solutions to both of these problems, addressing the former of the two issues by allowing urgent messages to appear on the screen of the end user in the form of flashes and news tickers as soon as they're recieved, and dealing with the latter by allowing those who send the messages to classify them as urgent or secondary in its importance; if a message is labeled as urgent, it'll automatically appear on the user's screen, but if it's marked as secondary, the user isn't immediately notified, and the file can be accessed later.
Also, Sales Accelerator and Service Accelerator alllow for easier integration of audio and video onto messages when compared with their e-mail-based counterparts, and differ from standard push solutions in that not only can individuals sign up to receive certain types of messages, but can be automatically subscribed for them as well by whoever manages the back-end software residing on corporate servers. Perhaps most importnatly, the software, unlike its infamous predecessors, has specialized functions for cutting down LAN traffic. These functions include IP multicasting, which allows only one copy of a given piece of information leaving a server, with the copy replicating for multiple users only when necessary, and peer downloads, which let an end-user download the information from a nearby computer that's already recieved it rather than from the server that initially distributed it, a device that might be much further away. This in-depth functionality has already convinced Cisco, Bell Atlantic, Charles Schwab, and several other companies to deploy Backweb's software to a large portion of their workforces.
Meanwhile, push also has a great deal of potential for altering the web experience of everyday internet users, past failures notwithstanding. This claim can be justified by the fact that there are certain types of data found on the internet for which it would make much more sense for it to be delivered to a client automatically than if the client was to look for it on his/her own. Examples include data on subjects for which new information is constantly being generated, but can't be found just by a quick glance at a portal or another site, situations in which it's critical that an end user comes across a given piece of information as soon as it's made available, and specialized content for which individuals would like to be kept abreast of, but don't wish to constantly check back on for new information since it doesn't come up everyday. Content that fits one or more of these criteria includes, among dozens of other things, software updates, notification that tickets for a concert are going on sale, and investment information. Backweb, noticing the potential size of this market, is selling their Service Accelerator line to companies that wish to provide just that kind of data. While this offering's fairly new, the company already counts among its customers Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, who are pre-installing private-label versions of Service Accelerator on their PCs in order to more easily provide software updates to their customers.
As functional as Backweb's software is, one drawback to the company's business model is that automated content delivery is a relatively simple task. Unlike one-to-one recommendation applications by the likes of Broadvision (NASDAQ: BVSN) and Net Perceptions (NASDAQ: NETP), that require the construction of complex algorithms, it doesn't take a programmer with an IQ of 160 to devise basic software that delivers information already requested by a client device, or that can be instructed by a third party to deliver such information. As a result, much of the functionality found in Backweb's software can also be attained from the offerings of their competitors, which include, among others, Active Software (NASDAQ: ASWX) and Vitria (NASDAQ: VITR) in the field of corporate data delivery, and Tibco (NASDAQ: TIBX) and Microstrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) in both the corporate and consumer markets. Meanwhile, some companies find content delivery software such a simple thing to create that they design versions of it on their own not in order to sell as a standalone product, but in order to integrate it with other, completely unrelated software of theirs. A perfect example of how this trend is manifesting itself comes from Real Networks, whose software automatically notifies its users about upgrades whenever they become available.
In spite of these facts, Backweb does have a competitive advantage when compared to its rivals. With standard push solutions, content is delivered either by the client activating a function in his/her software that checks for new information, or by the client being automatically notified of new information being available, and being given the option to retrieve it. Both techniques are inefficient in that the content delivery process isn't fully automated, requiring some action on the part of the end user. Also, both methods are a inconvenient in the sense that, in order to acquire the given data, bandwidth is consumed that you might've wanted for other purposes, such as viewing web pages. For example, it would be annoying if the speed at which you could browse the web slowed due to the fact that Real Networks initiated a download for a software upgrade without letting you know.
Backweb, through its patented "Polite Agent" technology, has found a solution to both problems. Polite Agent constantly checks on your internet connection to see if you're using bandwidth, delivering information only when you're not, and giving priority to other data traffic if you happen to begin using the internet for other purposes during the middle of a download. Thus, Real Networks could use Polite Agent to automatically send updates to its users, all the while not being an inconvenience; and if a person happens to sign off during the middle of a download, Backweb's software automatically finishes the download the next time you sign on without any loss of data. Furthermore, since Polite Agent doesn't intefere with standard web browsing, and since the overwhelming majority of all bandwidth allotted is wasted even by active internet users, consumer-oriented versions of Service Accelerator have the potential to go far beyond the traditional boundries of push to deliver hundreds of megabytes of content (hard drive space permitting), ranging from standard HTML and Acrobat files to MP3 and video clips, all with no action taken on the part of the end user; and if the given person happens to have one of the always-on fat pipes of broadband, the potentaial grows exponentially.
There is one thing I'd like to see Backweb do, and that's to partner with companies that do have the "complex algorithms" used to make profile-based product recommendation software. Given the already-described functionality of Polite Agent, the future proliferation of broadband, and the rate at which hard drive space costs are decreasing, content delivery will inevitably take place by means of individual profile analysis as well as by subscription-based delivery. However, for this to be done, software, such as that made by Broadvision and Net Perceptions, is needed to analyze individual browsing habits, and then send the proper content. While Backweb can still grow tremendously without making deals with these and other companies, such partnerships would be beneficial for them.
When discussing the failures of previous push-based solutions, Backweb CEO Eli Barkat stated that "the problem (with push) was never the concept, only the way it was used." Not only has Barkat's company changed the applications for which push is used for, it's also developed technology that allows them to create new uses by changing the basic concept behind it as well. As a result, the biggest thing left for Backweb to do in order to become "the FedEx of the web," as Barkat calls it, is for them to convince the world that an old technology can learn new tricks. |
