Enterprise play

SETH BERGER draws on his experience as a game developer in his role as CTO of Estco Medical, a Bethesda, Md.-based Web site developer for the medical industry. “In both the video game and enterprise environment there’s a large-scale production to create something, i.e., launching a video game or a new medical device,” he says. “In either case, with so many people needing to collaborate, there are tools now to streamline and coordinate these processes.”

The gaming industry is a cauldron of technology innovation as companies heartily compete for billions of dollars in revenues from devoted users. But what’s more, enterprise CTOs are taking notice of technologies coming out of this maturing “adolescent” industry. Game developers and publishers are solving complex issues amid a proving ground for technologies that can solve real-world problems — making advancements in collaboration, peer-to-peer networking, and data delivery. Gaming is getting serious.

Gamers demand speedy data delivery, complex and realistic graphics, and interactive computing -all delivered seamlessly and via a variety of channels for a variety of platforms. In short, they want the best of what information technology can provide. And as gaming industry spending is expected to reach nearly $12 billion in 2002, according to Framingham, Mass.-based research company IDC, the incentive is there to provide it for the ever-growing number of gamers.

Now, the technology solutions developed by CTOs in gaming companies are being eyed, and rolled out, for enterprise use.

CTOs from Estco Medical, Macquarium, TransGaming, and other companies are deploying gaming-oriented collaborative features. In the networking arena, they are taking note of new gaming technologies, such as bandwidth optimization from Internap, grid computing from Butterfly.net, and peer-to-peer file sharing deployed by Monkey Byte Development. And they’re joined by some powerful players. Major gaming platforms, including Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, incorporate an extensive set of industry-leading technologies.

Community collaboration

Technology is now deployed in interactive gaming to offer players an amazing real-life experience. A person sitting at a PC in Boston can sign on to a Web-based game and join players from San Francisco and France as they hunt each other or confront some common enemy. Behind the scenes, high-speed Internet connections backed by customized servers and life-like graphics make the experience all the more real.

These collaborative, interactive features can be carried over to enterprise uses, whether for increased Web site functionality or for richer graphical interfaces.

At Estco Medical, Berger has lead the development of Medigent, the company’s Web-based collaboration platform designed to help pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, biotech firms, and hospitals to effectively launch and manage online marketing initiatives.

“Just as community building allows game developers to hear what’s important to the gamers and develop better products, Medigent facilitates communication among patients, physicians, and other clinicians so that better treatment modalities can be developed,” Berger says.

“The graphics and ease-of-use that is a trademark of gaming is a critical selling point in software for use in the enterprise,” Berger says. “I’ve used a lot of the experience gained from creating games to create a visually engaging and easy-to-use interface for our software. This is really important because Medigent operates as a set of modular tools for collaboration, e-learning, content management, and community building.”

Berger still plays games, including the popular Unreal, and recalls his days as a game developer fondly. “As a developer, every day there is something new to learn in technology optimization,” he says. “It’s not a static business. Threedimensional graphics are already happening, but they are going to get better and better. There may be more active input devices such as more immersion technology, so that your controller might vibrate if you encounter something in the game.”

Network innovation

As games grow in sophistication and enable multiple users to participate, the need for fast, uninterrupted service is an absolute necessity. Networking solutions developed in response are now being pushed to new commercial deployments.

Ali Marashi, the CTO of Seattle-based ISP Internap Network Services, counts gaming companies among his top customers. But the company also serves customers outside gaming who have intense real-time and delivery needs, including Charles Schwab and Travelocity.

It’s the gamers, Marashi says, who have pushed him to help develop Internap’s network optimization technology that enables players around the world to interact more efficiently through the Internet.

“As we continue to push our technology further, the gaming industry developers, who are a pretty creative bunch, will demand more and push us to drive our technology further,” Marashi says.

Marashi says the demand for real-time, high-bandwidth, multiplayer gaming helped push development of his company’s private network access point platform, which optimizes routing from major service providers such as Sprint and Global Crossing.

Games that started out in offices using LAN connections are now spread worldwide and need the best possible connection, he says. “The challenge is getting the performance of a LAN for real-time action,” Marashi says. “You have to get it out onto the Internet or the experience is lost. If I’m in a game and I throw an ax at someone, they need to be able to react in real time.”

Speed is everything for real-time gaming and CTOs are turning to grid architecture as an answer. The developing technology of grid networks is getting early commercial use in gaming as Martinsburg, W.Va.-based Butterfly.net has deployed a server grid for multiplayer games.

Butterfly.net’s grid is among the first to allow multiplayer games to scale and support unlimited players. The grid allocates communications and computing resources to the most popular games. Thus traffic jams created by players flocking to a popular game can be avoided.

“In the past, grids have been academically oriented. We are now at the point where the gaming industry is clamoring for the kind of niceties that academia has enjoyed,” says Butterfly CTO Mark Wirt. “We are partnering with IBM because of their efforts with grid infrastructure.”

Early adopters such as Butterfly can show other companies how to deploy an efficient, low-cost network in a money-making fashion, Wirt says.

Another game-related company, San Leandro, Calif.-based Monkey Byte Development, is adopting peer-to peer technology for commercial use by serving growing demand from games users, says CEO and CTO Jon Hardisty.

As an online game publishing service with 500,000 unique users a month, Monkey Byte needs to be able to scale its network delivery infrastructure to meet the demand caused when new games are published and users flock to use the Monkey Byte site. The company is using a peer-to-peer content delivery network from CenterSpan.

Peer-to-peer systems are growing in popularity for a number of reasons, says Susan Kervorkian, IDC’s senior analyst of the consumer devices and technologies group. “Companies are using peer-to-peer for enterprise-based streaming and file transfer,” she says. “The bottom line is that it’s proving cost-effective.”

Hillsboro, Ore.-based CenterSpan pushes caching files to the end-user’s desktop and, by using the end-user caches, it reduces hardware scaling costs significantly and ensures reliable delivery of the data, regardless of the number of requests. The technology is designed to automatically grow the peer server network on demand.

Gaming’s influence is prompting creativity aimed at improving network efficiency in a variety of ways. Atlanta-based Macquarium has adopted the use of 3-D graphics cards to bolster the functionality of the Web sites it designs for clients such as Kimberly Clark, says Jay Cann, CTO of Macquarium. The company follows the lead of gaming technology by using potent video cards for three-dimensional graphics on the Web sites it designs for clients.

“The gaming industry has pushed to the forefront the need to have [3-D capacity] hardware,” Cann says. “Because people are buying systems with video in mind, you now have 3-D video cards.”

Game platforms are another area marked for innovation by developers whose work opens up new models for enterprise use, says Gavriel State, founder, CTO, and CEO of Toronto-based TransGaming Technologies.

TransGaming creates software portability components that allow developers and publishers to build games for a single system, and then deploy those games to other platforms. “We produce a software layer that allows us to run existing applications designed for Windows on other platforms,” State says.

This cross-platform compatibility not only fosters a broader dissemination of popular games, it also leads the way for enterprise application development, State says.

“We’ve chosen games to target with this product because [games are] the fastest growing segment of the [technology] industry,” State says. “But for the enterprise it will allow companies to bring applications to different platforms.”

Flagship gaming platforms

As more and more gaming-related technologies are snapped up for adoption in the enterprise, Microsoft and Sony continue to consolidate features on their gaming platforms, and top-ranked game developers such as Sega think of new ways to create games.

Microsoft’s adoption of a particular technology will often mean industrywide acceptance, and it has ambitious plans for its Xbox console, says Todd Holmdahl, general manager of Xbox hardware at Microsoft.

“First, we are doing online and broadband [gaming] in beta and it’s taking off,” Holmdahl says. “It allows people to do so much with the console with more competition, groups of players, [and] high-speed gaming. We’ve added voice on [Xbox] so people can chat or talk trash in the middle of their game.

Holmdahl sees Microsoft’s gaming as a leader in technology implementation. “[Gaming] is a huge business, growing a lot faster than most businesses,” he says.

Likewise, Philip Wiser, CTO of New York-based Sony Music Entertainment, says his sister company Sony Computer Entertainment is forging ahead with new technologies for its PlayStation platform. “The gaming platform now has capacity for [enhanced] networking and larger scale local [data] storage; it opens up all kinds of possibilities,” he says.

Meanwhile, new technologies still arise from the game developers. Sega, maker of the popular Dreamcast game, is now developing game networks and helping to push new network technology, says John Kuner, director of online development at Sega.com, the online unit of Sega.

“We’ve got a lot of knowledge from our gaming-development experience,” Kuner says. “We expect 114 million people to be playing games online in the next four years. I see the experience becoming more and more ubiquitous. The network is going to be the next 3-D playing field. Now, every game is 3-D enabled. We’d like to see the network enabled like that. You plug in your console, you plug into the network and you play with your friends so you are interacting with an extended community.”

Such technology, Kuner says, “applies to anything.”