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Build Decision: Development
WebGain Targets Java E-business Enterprise Developers
Java developers building e-business applications are the target customers of WebGain, Inc., a Cupertino, Calif.-based start-up formed by Warburg Pincus Venture and BEA Systems, Inc. The company combines the VisualCafe Java development tool sold off by Symantec Corp., with several other acquired tools to create a component development and assembly solution.
WebGain Studio, the company's flagship product, combines VisualCafe with StructureBuilder, TopLink and Dreamweaver from Macromedia. The president and CEO of WebGain, Joe Menard, was formerly the president of the E-Commerce Server Division at BEA. He oversaw the acquisition of the products. After VisualCafe was acquired in January, WebGain in March acquired Tendril StructureBuilder, a suite of model-based tools for designing, developing and deploying Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), was acquired from Tendril Software, Inc. In April, WebGain acquired TopLink, an object to relational mapping tool, from The Object People of Ottawa. Finally in July, WebGain acquired Zat, Inc., an application assembly technology. Release 1.0 of WebGain Studio shipped in June
WebGain was formed in answer to the trend of developers moving from Windows to the Web, said Ted Farrell, CTO of WebGain. "Applications are no longer sitting just on PCs. They are in browsers and need to be accessible from any device," he said. In addition, development cycles need to be ever shorter, and the application architecture needs to be plug-and-play. The tools will support application servers from BEA, Netscape/AOL (iPlanet) and IBM (WebSphere).
The company is targeting several segments of developers: lower-level Java developers skilled in the use of VisualCafe or similar tools, Cobol programmers seeking new skills, IT analysts, experienced Visual Basic programmers and line of business analysts. "There are programmers who understand logic flow and are into wiring things together," Farrell said.
The aim of the tools is to enable its users to build application components and wire them together. In the future, the tool will be extended so that developers "may be wiring services together." Farrell said, noting, "It should not matter whether you are connecting to a component or buying a service." Pre-built service offerings are likely to evolve to allow this type of "wiring."
To support application assembly, the company would like to acquire a tool effective at capturing business process, but the search has not borne fruit.
After the company acquired VisualCafe Enterprise Edition, it added a new debugger and just-in-time compiler. StructureBuilder supports UML modeling and is targeted to Java developers, in contrast to Rational Rose from Rational, which is targeted to object modelers. The integration of Dreamweaver enables "real-time" programming in that changes made in the VisualCafe tool are immediately reflected in the Dreamweaver code. The company calls this "live editing" feature a major time-saver.
The WebGain mission is a challenging one that has been tried before. "People have been trying to do component assembly for 15 years, and it's never really worked out," Farrell said. Obstacles to success have included a nonstandard platform, addressed to a large degree by Java and the Internet, and the absence of an effective way to index and catalog components. "That's a hurdle that needs to be jumped for application assembly to really take off," he said. If WebGain cannot build the solution, the company hopes to license it, but Farrell was not sure if anyone has the technology required.
The company bought the Zat tool because it supported the deployment of EJBs as well as Java servlets, he said. That is importantly because the inability to change a deployed servlet is a major limitation, especially for performance reasons. "In a big application, the servlet could kill the system," he said. With Zat, EJB and servlets are each deployment option.
WebGain Studio with VisualCafe, StructureBuilder and Dreamweaver is priced at $4,995; Studio Pro adds TopLink and is priced at $8,995.
www.webgain.com
Customer Focus
WebTone Focuses on Multi-Channel Customer Care
Internet-enabled customer care and relationship management is the business of WebTone Technologies in Atlanta, Ga. Michael McChesney, the co-founder of Security First Network Bank, an Internet bank founded the start-up in 1997. That bank experience gave McChesney insight into challenges related to helping customers interacting through a Web site and over the telephone to conduct business.
The insight led to the development of Harmony Customer Care Suite, which integrated telephone functionality with Web-based communications. The three components of the suite are Webtone Response, WebTone Guides and WebTone Gram. Response focuses on managing customer communications via e-mail, phone, fax and Web-based channels. Guides are pre-populated forms that can be customized by customers making routine service requests. Gram is an e-mail solution that allows customers to communicate with the business in a secure fashion. Underlying the product suite is a common platform that understands e-mail, voice and the Internet in order to present a single view of customers.
"Our ideal customer is someone who looks not just at the call center, but at the enterprise," said James K. Szyperski, president and CEO of WebTone.
Next-generation customer care is the focus of the business. "Most people have not looked at customer care as a fundamental part of their customer strategy," he said. "But the customer care piece is an integral part of the dot-com launch strategy. If you don't do that, you are teeing yourself up for failure."
The e-mail management component of Harmony was the first to ship, becoming available in December 1999. The company now has more than a dozen customers up and running, mostly in banking and insurance, including Citibank and Security First Network Bank. A secure "chat" component is scheduled to be released this summer, and voice over the Internet will be supported later this year, Szyperski said. The product has been in development over a two-year period.
The convergence of multiple customer points of contact into one customer care system will challenge the traditional call center players, he suggested. "Traditional call centers in the next 18 to 24 months will be turned on their heads," he suggested. "It will become increasingly difficult to integrate different channels into a single view of the customer. It's like building a house of cards."
More and more companies will decide to outsource their call centers, he predicted. "We think it's a wonderful business, but the analysts don't like it," Szyperski said. He is forming a partnership with a company building a third-party call center with access to broadband multimedia network pipes. It was too early to identify the partner. More professional services will be required to implement integrated call center solutions as well, he suggested, noting the current shortage of qualified people to do the work. WebTone has some professional services staff but would rather partner with services players than focus on that business itself.
Pricing is based on per-seat costs, averaging $500 to $1,500 per seat, or $250,000 to $500,000 per customer. The company also plans to offer its system on an application service provider basis, the details of which are still being worked out. hosted system alternative
www.webtonetech.com
Infrastructure: Systems Management
WebTrends Adds Real-time Firewall, VPN Monitoring
IT managers are finally getting some help in ferreting out security problems while there's still time to prevent serious damage, with the latest entrant to the market being WebTrends Corp. of Portland, Ore.
WebTrends Firewall Suite 3.0 adds the capability to be alerted immediately to potential security breaches detected by any of the 30 firewall and virtual private network (VPN) products the WebTrends product can monitor. At the same time, the company announced three additional vendors - Sun, 3Com and Secure Computing - are now supporting the WebTrends Enhanced Logging Format (WELF) specification, which a firewall or VPN product logs data in a way that is compatible with WebTrends Firewall Suite.
With the real-time alert capability, WebTrends joins vendors including e-Security, Inc. of Naples, Fla. and IBM's Tivoli unit in offering a type of console that can monitor multiple security devices. e-Security's Open e-Security Platform and Tivoli's SecureWay Risk Manager can both monitor more types of devices than WebTrends, with support for intrusion-detection systems (IDS) in addition to firewalls and VPNs. Derek Fine, product marketing manager for WebTrends, says his company is considering adding support for IDS products.
Prior to this release, the WebTrends tool was used for bandwidth analysis, security analysis and for monitoring employee Web usage, Fine said. It could provide reports that indicate how full an Internet connection is at various times during the day, and provide analysis to determine when a faster connection may be needed. In the security area, it provides reports based on data culled from firewall and VPN device logs, pointing to potential vulnerabilities and attempted break-ins.
That latter capability now essentially happens in real time, Fine said, so administrators can be alerted to a break-in while it's happening via audio alarm, e-mail or pager. WebTrends Firewall Suite also now enables administrators to detect if a firewall goes down or stops logging data and, if so, to restart it remotely.
Performance has been improved, with the ability to analyze log files up to 50% faster than in previous versions. Also new is the integration of the WebTrends Security Analzyer to the Firewall Suite. The analyzer is a vulnerability assessment tool that reports on and gives advice on how to fix potential security problems, Fine said. A 10-system edition of the analyzer that is good for 30 days is now included with the Firewall Suite.
WebTrends Firewall Suite 3.0 costs $1,999 per firewall or VPN proxy device that you want to monitor. The company is offering a free 14-day trial of a full working version of the product.
www.webtrends.com
Protection: Security
SecureClean: When "Delete" Really Has to Mean "Delete"
As most IT managers know, when you click "delete" to get rid of a file on a Windows-based PC or server, you are not really getting rid of the file at all. Even emptying the Recycle Bin doesn't remove the file completely; you're merely removing a pointer to the file, so that it no longer shows up in the file system. It still lingers on your hard disk until such time as it is overwritten by other data.
Companies are now realizing this as a security and liability risk, says Eldon Lechtenberg, president of AccessData Corp. in Provo, Utah. His company this week announced SecureClean Version 3, which he says is the first product to address the requirements of an enterprise in managing deleted data. While any number of utilities are available that can wipe a disk clean, he says none address the systemic, routine deletion of unwanted data.
SecureClean helps companies avoid losses that occur from at least three areas: old PCs that are donated to various organizations while still full of corporate data; corporate espionage; and litigation.
The latter is a developing trend, Lechtenberg says, that has to do with the discovery process of a lawsuit. During this process, a company typically has to submit all sorts of documents. Plaintiffs' lawyers, knowing the technology is available to capture deleted files, are now asking for access to deleted documents on corporate-owned PCs and servers. Often this is merely a ploy to force a settlement because the plaintiff knows it would be too costly for the defendant to go to the time and trouble of recapturing all its deleted documents.
SecureClean helps companies avoid that scenario by regularly purging all documents that have been deleted, such that they become impossible to recover. The product will overwrite all deleted documents with a series of meaningless 1s and 0s, thus purging them forever from the disk drive, just as any disk wiping tool does.
But SecureClean allows companies to devise policies regarding how to determine which previously deleted files to overwrite and at what intervals. At the appointed time, it runs unattended as a utility in background mode, much as virus scanning software does, with users typically unaware of its presence. In that fashion, can eliminate all sources of potentially sensitive data, including previously deleted e-mail.
Administrators can program SecureClean to delete unwanted files on various drives and locations, including free space, file slack, RAM slack, .TMP files and on ZIP and JAZ drives.
SecureClean Version 3 is the first version available for general distribution. Previous versions were sold only on the AcessData Web site and were intended only for personal use.
The product is available now. A 10-license version costs $450. Additional discounts are available for larger licenses.
www.secureclean.com
