National Semiconductor Pushes Away Lotus and PointCast were obvious choices for NSC. Back to the IntraNet index page

By Elisabeth Horwitt
Network World, 4/27/98

American Management Systems, Inc. had high hopes for using "push" technology to speed delivery of time-sensitive internal data.

AMS particularly liked PointCast, Inc.'s SmartScreen delivery mechanism. Whenever a worker's screen had been idle long enough, SmartScreen streamed headlines and article blurbs that originated from departmental- or workgroup-sponsored "channels'' to which that user subscribed. Full text came with a mouse click.

Nevertheless, after pilot testing SmartScreen, the consulting firm decided to stick with its Lotus Development Corp. Notes software. An application being developed will link users to internal information via a Notes repository with active links to AMS databases. E-mail news flashes will alert users to important new documents.

The Notes application won't provide the same comprehensive, active notification as SmartScreen, admits Arlette Hart, a principal at AMS, in Fairfax, Va. "We think of it as semi-push,'' she says.

On the other hand, the infrastructure for managing the information and delivery process is already in place. AMS calculated that it would have taken five or six man-hours per week for an internal group to administer its corporate PointCast channel. Her group never even got around to measuring the time it takes to gather or generate the actual news articles being sent out. "We didn't want to discourage people,'' Hart says.

AMS' story is typical. The largely human cost of setting up, administering and maintaining another information distribution infrastructure signaled an early demise for push, says Mike Gotta, workgroup computing strategies program director at The Meta Group, Inc., in Stamford, Conn. But push carries on: Vendors are moving, albeit slowly, from stand-alone and proprietary offerings to products that are standards-based and integrated with other information architectures.

Cuts two ways

Push products address the issue of information overload and can step up user productivity and the quality of decisions by delivering information in a more immediate, active way. Push systems deliver the information directly to users' clients or notify users, via scroll bars or pop-up windows, of information available on the server.

Companies such as National Semiconductor Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., recognize competitive value in the technology. "Users log in each morning and get a snapshot of yesterday's business picture: top revenues, top opportunities, unit volumes, activity on our Web site,'' says Phil Gibson, the company's director of interactive marketing. Our implementation provides priceless information in a timely way that accelerates decision-making, he adds.

Despite these benefits, the company might have had a hard time justifying the cost of the deployment if much of the push system and the infrastructure hadn't been in place. That infrastructure, including the knowledge management back end, security/access control and channel administration, is built on Lotus products and Web specifications. (For more information, go to www.nwfusion.com and type in DocFinder No. 6804.)

"We primarily have Notes-based push, with PointCast [SmartScreen] as the display mechanism,'' Gibson says.

Gibson's approach is similar to others in his position. Push implementors are demanding the same sort of infrastructure components they require for the intranet, Notes or any other critical information system. The idea is for push to be one of several intranet-based information distribution mechanisms administered, controlled and accessed by the same systems, Gotta says. Traveling users would be able to dial in and pick up information from Notes, e-mail or the push system via the same interface. System administrators would be able to use a common set of user log on/identifications and a single network directory service for managing user access to all networked applications and databases, including push servers.

To ease the integration with existing systems, some push vendors now support browsers. However, a proprietary element often is involved.

Users can access BackWeb Technologies, Inc.'s BackWeb channels via Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 4.0, for example, but first they must download a proprietary client optimized for that browser. The push vendor is considering full Internet Explorer 4.0 support, but that could preclude BackWeb's ability to funnel information from multiple sources into one place, says Julie Martin, vice president of product marketing at BackWeb, in San Jose, Calif.

An increasing number of push companies also have introduced HTTP support. Previously, push products used proprietary transport that intranet firewalls didn't recognize.

Another proprietary problem is that some push products broadcast information rather than multicast it. Besides making it difficult to integrate push with existing intranet/Internet systems, this can cause bandwidth logjams, says John Graham-Cumming, director of product architecture for Optimal Networks Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., network application management vendor.

Broadcast sends identical data to each channel group. Multicast, in contrast, sends the file once for each recipient to pluck off along the way. Some vendors now support multicast, often by using Tibco, Inc.'s TIB/Rendezvous.

Indeed, bandwidth consumption is one of the issues that Federal Express Corp. plans to evaluate thoroughly before committing to rolling out Marimba, Inc.'s Castanet push software across an organization of some 140,000 people, says Dick Davis, manager of infrastructure design at FedEx. Marimba and many of its rivals partially address the issue with proxy servers or repeaters that serve local user groups and minimize corporate WAN traffic.

Companies such as PointCast also let users reconfigure clients to request updates less often - although that can be a major project with thousands of clients, Graham-Cumming says.

Vendors are also beginning to make it possible for IT managers to hook push systems into the same security and directory services they use to administer user profiles and access rights on other corporate information systems. For example, Wayfarer Communications, Inc.'s Wayfarer 4.0 supports RSA Data Security, Inc. encryption through Secure Sockets Layer and user authentication based on Microsoft's NT Registry. DataChannel, Inc.'s ChannelManager integrates with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directories, and PointCast supports the same authentication and directory services as the Web server in use.

On managing knowledge

Where push integration counts the most, however, is in the back end that "gathers, aggregates, filters, catalogs and classifies information" that will be distributed by a push system as part of a company's knowledge management initiative, Gotta says. Push vendors approach knowledge management in three ways. First, companies such as BackWeb, Wayfarer and DataChannel specialize in tools that automate the arduous job of accessing, aggregating, sorting and channeling data from multiple sources, including other push products. For example, DataChannel's ChannelBase database repository maps a corporate information schema to various content resources, such as Web pages; Castanet and BackWeb channels; PC, legacy and Java applications; and databases.

BackWeb provides a panel profiling tool that creates panels from contents on outside Web sites and intranet servers and databases. IT can deliver that information to users via BackWeb's push mechanism, Martin says.

And Wayfarer 4.0 includes a DataBridge that can track changes and deliver news alerts and update notifications from the systems of corporate software vendors such as Oracle Corp., SAP AG, The Baan Co. and PeopleSoft, Inc.

Secondly, push vendors are beginning to support leading intranet specifications for defining, selecting and publishing content. Those specs are the World Wide Web Consortium's Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF). DataChannel, for example, has announced a database-driven XML designed to add user profiling, group administration and user interface customization capabilities to XML.

The one drawback to using generic, industrywide specifications is that developers will have to write scripts for handling more sophisticated capabilities, such as linking directory user profiles to specific channels and views. In the next three to six months, however, a bevy of third parties will provide such capabilities for push products "tightly integrated with XML, Notes, mainframe systems, SQL databases - whatever,'' says Max Mancini, senior product manager at PointCast. This paves the way for letting users set up an intranet-based back end to feed Web publishing, push and other applications. The third way that vendors have made it easier for users to build an integrated push infrastructure is by embedding push technology in vertical applications and application development environments. A number of sales force automation vendors, for example, use First Floor Software, Inc.'s SmartDelivery product in their software.

FedEx is using Velociti, a push program that Vitria Technology, Inc. has embedded in its Business-In-Realtime application development suite. An application based on Vitria's Agiliti business process engine tracks and captures information about shipments flowing through FedEx's hubs.

Davis' people at FedEx are currently using Velociti to set up event-driven information delivery. This lets employees ask to see when incoming shipments from a particular ZIP code are building up. In the next phase, users will be able to program alerts for specific concerns, such as when a shipment volume goes over a particular threshold, Davis says.

Information about key events, such as incoming shipments, is immediately pushed to subscribers, as well as to a data warehouse. Vitria supports CORBA 2.0 IDL for generating self-describing messages that can be posted to other databases and formats, Davis says.

Meanwhile, FedEx is still looking at complementing Velocity with Castanet for general use. "If it were up to me, we'd have fewer push formats, products and infrastructures to manage," Davis admits. "But realistically, that won't happen."