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To: Jerry Miller who wrote (2165)	6/7/1998 4:52:00 PM
From: flickerful	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

Netscape Sees Its Future In Portals (06/05/98; 8:23 p.m. ET) By Malcolm Maclachlan, TechWeb SAN FRANCISCO -- Netscape has seen its future, and it is a portal. The company, once Microsoft's greatest threat, has hitched itself to Yahoo's star, and wants to create the website that more people use to enter the Internet. To that end, Netscape has crafted a two-pronged strategy to market its enterprise software to major corporations setting up electronic commerce sites, and then help drive traffic to those sites using its Netcenter portal site. "Not only can we help you get on the Net," company co-founder Marc Andreessen said at a meeting with reporters and analysts on Thursday, "we can also help drive your business directly from Netcenter." Netscape said Netcenter gets 8.2 million visitors every day, making it the most visited site on the Web. This kind of traffic gives Netcenter huge potential for advertising sales, but also makes it a lucrative way to ship consumers to its business partners' sites. Ultimately, Netscape (company profile) envisions Netcenter becoming one of up to four mass-market portal sites on the Web, said Steve Savignano, senior vice president of application products, but it also plans to address the business-to-business commerce market as well. "There will be thousands of portal sites specialized around vertical markets," Savignano said. Netscape will be a major player in this portal proliferation, Savignano said, because it has the software, services, and online presence to help make them happen. Other Internet companies have already begun pursuing vertical market strategies. PointCast, for example, revamped its network last month to include specialized information channels for industries such as health care, government, and telecommunications. Keng Lim, vice president of application platforms and tools, said large corporate customers can use Netscape servers for nearly all of their needs, from Web hosting to legacy database integration to a variety of commerce applications. With Netscape Application Server holding it all together, Lim said, companies can outsource a variety of new functions through a portal architecture. In this "Net Economy," resources such as bandwidth and e-mail could be sold as services, said John Paul, senior vice president of the server products division. An online trading company, for example, could buy greater bandwidth off a network in anticipation of a heightened trading activity. A small business could buy e-mail service the same way it buys phone service, instead of purchasing an expensive e-mail server. Analysts greeted Netscape's new vision with enthusiasm. "They finally have a story," said Heather Ashton, an industry analyst with the Hurwitz Group. But she was not totally convinced. For example, Ashton said, she does not see a compelling reason for small companies to outsource functions like e-mail. Zona Research analyst Vernon Keenan believes Netscape is on the right track. "If electronic transactions are what's driving the consumer portal sites, then there is clearly an opportunity to create community and page views for business-to-business transactions as well," Keenan wrote in a report. But CommerceXpert, Netscape's line of enterprise commerce software, needs to gain market share to support the types of large, business-specific portals Netscape wants to offer, Keenan said. Netcenter, too, has a long way to go in terms of security and personalization before it becomes a repository of business critical information.