Neugents: The thinking man's agent

NEW ORLEANS - Neugents are striking a chord with Computer Associates software users, though the technology is still largely unproven in business scenarios.

At the CA-World user conference last week, the company talked freely about the promised benefits of its neural network software agents, called Neugents. But at this point, many of CA's Neugents are only in beta testing.

Neugents will pervade the next versions of CA's core products - namely Unicenter systems management software and its Jasmine object-oriented database. The value of Neugents is that they look for patterns in data and can extrapolate from the patterns to predict future events, according to CA. Neugents can look at up to 1,200 variables and make sense of them all.

Business data is one area in which CA is pushing the new technology. "You could get to know the customer a little bit better," says Margo Weeks, vice president of IT for Radio Shack Canada. For example, by looking at customers' buying patterns, a Neugent might be able to predict which customers are more inclined to purchase extended warranties, she says.

Another CA user considering Neugents is The Sharper Image. Data mining is critical to the company's success, especially as it increases online shopping efforts, says Meredith Medland, director of the company's Internet division.

"The future of e-commerce is data mining, whether that's [managed by] Neugents or anything else," she says.

In data mining or other large-scale applications, the user has to know which variables to tell a Neugent to watch. In many cases, CA will customize the Neugent technology through its professional services division.

The first Neugent, announced in April 1998 and shipped in December, predicts performance for Windows NT servers. One upcoming Neugent will look at network data to predict when routers will fail (see story, above).

Ron Seggio, divisional vice president of information services at PaineWebber, is impressed with Neugents for looking at network and systems trends. But Seggio wonders how easy it would be to migrate from the current Unicenter version to one using Neugents.

Meanwhile, CA is aggressively marketing Neugents with language that can only be called hyperbolic. "One Neugent is smarter than a million Albert Einsteins," one of its commercials says.

"When a Neugent comes up with the Theory of Relativity, I'll be impressed," says John McConnell, president of McConnell Associates in Boulder, Colo. But McConnell adds that he will reserve judgment about Neugents until he has a chance to talk to early users. CA says early users aren't willing to talk publicly about the technology yet because they see it as experimental.