Internet Showcase features distinguished Java products

Welcome to the buy side

It was quickly obvious that Upside/Coursey’s Internet Showcase was not just another Internet technology trade show offering a ,000 t-shirt, all the free sodas one can drink, and little of the substance one had hoped. Unlike the devcons and code caravans to which I’ve grown accustomed, Internet Showcase showed this developer how the other side lives: the buy side, the often nameless and faceless venture capitalists who are raining El Nino money on us these days. (Picture JavaOne, only instead of endless cattle calls for beta CDs and potato chips, you get a waitered buffet with a wine list. I’m not kidding.)

Within moments of scurrying into the gorgeous Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, I knew this was going to be a sweet gig as an eerily familiar voice boomed from the heavens. Matt Elmore, the fatherly voice of KQED (San Francisco’s flagship public television station), was the public address announcer, and, my friends, the man was on fire. To hear Mr. Elmore (the same guy who pleasantly reminds you that “English Quiltmaking Through the Ages” will be followed this evening by “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: The Amazing Weasel,”) bellow things like, “and next, we have eFusion, whose eStream gateway provides ISPs a scalable platform to deliver H.323-based voice and data communications over a single RJ-45 phone line,” was indeed disconcerting, akin to that first frantic phone call you take from your parents asking if they should use DHCP to configure DNS.

I soon recovered, however, and began enjoying a menu of product and services demonstrations handpicked by David Coursey himself. (For those of you not familiar with David Coursey, his name and work are worth getting to know, as he’s become a bit of a luminary these days in the technology venture community. He publishes an influential newsletter, coursey.com. The San Diego Tribune called him the “Dick Clark of the Internet,” whatever the hell that means. )

Hot Buzz

Internet Showcase was not focused exclusively on Java technologies, though there were a variety of Java offerings on display. I’ve capsuled a handful of notable companies and their products here. These items distinguished themselves at the show as innovative and promising uses of Java technology, and will be companies to watch and learn from as 1998 progresses.

Ariba Technologies, Ariba ORMS

Ariba, fewer than 18 months old, already has garnered some premium accolades and attention from the right places, including Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Ariba’s products attempt to automate and streamline corporate purchasing processes like Siebel did for sales and SAP did for manufacturing. In joining this group of package vendors, they’ve coined the obligatory 3-letter package acronym, ORM, for operating resource management, and carved out a sustainable market lead over competitors like TRADE’ex.

Ariba already has signed some high-profile customers, including Visa U.S.A., Cisco, AMD, and Octel Communications, and the company’s growth potential seems limited only by capacity to support its growing customer base.

Ariba shows how architecturally rich, commercial-quality software products can be built in extremely rapid timeframes using Java technologies. Ariba features some of the most robust, functional, and attractive applet clients on the market tied to a distributed Java backend that provides sophisticated rules-based workflow approval and routing, as well as integration modules with leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resource management system (HRMS) packages.

Ariba, located in Sunnyvale, CA, is funded by Benchmark and Crosspoint and employs 50 people. The third major release of Ariba ORMS will ship in February, 1998.

General Magic, Serengeti

General Magic, now an old and wizened emerging technology player, has completely licked its wounds from the Magic Cap/Telescript/Magic Link PDA disaster of the early 1990s to bring Serengeti to market. This time around, General Magic will leverage the excellent penetration that the Internet and personal digital assistants such as 3Com’s PalmPilot have made into corporate America to provide sophisticated agent-based personal communications services.

The Serengeti demo must be seen to be believed. The gist is that Serengeti would provide a bridge between all of the communication services that we rely upon for our daily bread: e-mail, voicemail, pages, faxes, cellular phones, etc. Using Serengeti, you can issue free speech commands to a virtual executive assistant, which can route messages from one media to another, reply to urgent messages on your behalf, and fetch information from the Internet. Serengeti utilizes text-to-speech (TTS) software from AcuVoice, the most natural-sounding implementation of TTS that I’ve heard to date.

Starfish’s palmtop PIM suite (which also is used in those nifty new Rolodex REX PCMCIA cards) has been licensed by General Magic for inclusion in Serengeti. Serengeti’s logic backbone is formed by Odyssey, General Magic’s Java agent platform. Notably, Odyssey’s development is being headed by Danny Lange, formerly of IBM Research and father of IBM’s successful and groundbreaking Aglet Workbench.

General Magic, located in Sunnyvale, CA, is publicly traded on NASDAQ as GMGC, and employs 100 people. Serengeti will be made be available in the first half of 1998.

SilverStream Software, SilverStream

Many JavaWorld readers are probably familiar with SilverStream and its eagerly awaited SilverStream Web Application Platform. The company, intentionally or otherwise, successfully generated a significant amount of buzz in 1997 prior to finally shipping the product in December. After reading the company’s product literature over the past year, which is littered with the vague superlatives that characterize most Java marketing efforts, I admit that I was growing a bit impatient and frustrated.

Happily, the wait was worth it. SilverStream is indeed the real deal, and it should make a significant dent in the hyper-competitive Web application development tools market. SilverStream heats up the app server wars with a strong product and a 95/seat list price, countering last year’s disturbing market trend of development tools costing more than my car.

For those of you who have worked in the past with visual client/server database development tools like PowerBuilder, Delphi, or Visual Basic, you will appreciate SilverStream’s visual design strengths and transparent widget databinding. Java application server-wise, SilverStream is in the same class as NetDynamics, Progress’ Apptivity, and the like. SilverStream sets itself apart from other Java appserver/studio entries on a few notes. First, it can build Java and HTML clients from the same studio; toggling a single property switches your generated user interface between Java and a close-as-possible HTML variant. Second, SilverStream is 100% Java, through and through. This means you can leverage some advanced components used in the development environment itself, such as its very impressive HTML renderer, in your own applications.

SilverStream, located in Burlington, MA, is privately funded by Intel, North Bridge Venture Partners, Matrix Patners, ESSEX Investment Management Company. The company employs 85 people. The first release of SilverStream shipped in December, 1997.

WebLine Communications, WebLine

WebLine offers a call center Internet-enablement product that could have significant effects on the way commerce is transacted on the Web. Using WebLine, site administrators place a “Call an Agent” button on their pages. A user clicking this button is routed to an information form, after which the call is routed into a callback queue for return by a customer support representative (CSR). The CSR returning the call can take control of the customer’s browser through a small-footprint Java applet, guide the customer to the appropriate product information pages, present online product demonstrations, and ease the customer through the online purchasing process. This relatively simple piece of software mitigates one of the significant barriers to extending electronic commerce beyond the realm of T-shirts and mugs; major capital purchases are rarely made without first hearing the reassuring voice of a real live human being.

Webline, located in Burlington, MA, is funded by Information Technology Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, Advent, and Draper Fisher Jurveston. WebLine currently employs 30 people. The first release of WebLine shipped in October 1997.

Getting Down to Business

According to Coursey, the theme of this year’s Internet Showcase was: “1998, the year the Internet gets down to business.” I’m not sure how many times I’ve used variations on that standby slogan as an excuse to play with and write about interesting technologies, but it still seems to work, since my employer gladly paid for the trip to San Diego and JavaWorld gladly paid for this column. I thank them both and I thank you, the reader, who I look forward to seeing in San Francisco, March 24-27, at JavaOne ’98: “The show where Java gets down to business, for real this time — we’re serious.”