PointCast gives push a cache injection

By Andy Eddy
Network World, 09/28/98

Sunnyvale, Calif. - While PointCast has suffered through a marked decline in the acceptance of push technology, its caching product is inspiring some large companies to give push another try - and with sometimes stunning results.

PointCast's initial concept of push technology - using a software client to deliver content in desired categories directly to user desktops - was greeted with open arms. The media lauded the idea as the next generation of information delivery, like getting a customized newscast right to your computer at any time you choose.

The reality of push indeed met that model - for the most part. Unfortunately, a large issue came to the fore: Enterprise networks were taking major bandwidth hits from the immense data flow delivered to push participants.

With caching for various forms of Web-based data becoming a standard consideration for enterprises, it's no surprise that PointCast would devise a similar method of handling its data flow to clients. Indeed, in June 1997, PointCast introduced its Caching Manager.

According to Dan Bauhaus, PointCast's senior business consultant, Caching Manager works much like a proxy server: It sits at the firewall and stores content that flows through it. When another user requests a document already in the cache, the document is delivered at a higher speed over the LAN or WAN without the need to call it up over the Internet.

With bigger customers - those with more than 500 clients, PointCast has found the efficiency of Caching Manager climbing up in the mid-90% range, which indicates a gigantic bandwidth savings for companies, Bauhaus notes. In some cases, that bandwidth savings has opened doors for PointCast that had been previously closed.

One example is Hewlett-Packard, where PointCast was essentially banned because of its impact on company bandwidth. With the addition of Caching Manager last November, HP has not only permitted PointCast back onto its desktops, but in May it also created an internal "channel," called Edge, which passes pertinent information to HP's sales, marketing and technical support employees.

Edge's managing editor, Bill Hornung, reveals that approximately 1,200 desktops are using PointCast to receive the channel. He estimates that number will climb to 25,000 over the next year.

Another large company that has benefited from Caching Manager is MCI. Pat McLaughlin, senior systems engineer at MCI's Network Services division in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, says MCI had no restrictions on its employees' use of PointCast, but Caching Manager has made PointCast less of a burden. McLaughlin says at least 845 employees are getting PointCast data through Caching Manager, accounting for about 90,000 transactions per month. Christy Schwaderer, a programmer and analyst at MCI, says Caching Manager has resulted in an approximately 90% reduction in data through the firewall.

Caching Manager is free and downloadable from www. pointcast.com/products/intranet. It runs on Windows NT (as a C++ program) and Solaris (in Java).

The NT version is administered through an application that runs on Windows 95, 98 and NT, and administration for the Solaris version is handled with a Web-based Java interface.

PointCast: (408) 990-7000