Entrieva gives voice to net management

It's 3 a.m. and you get a telephone call that your company's network has gone down. Thanks to software from start-up Entrieva, you can diagnose and fix the network problem over the phone and then go back to sleep.

With software shipping for a year and several successful customer deployments, Entrieva is expanding its focus beyond network management to offer interactive voice access to other enterprise applications. Entrieva recently changed its name from Webversa to reflect its broader focus.

Entrieva is a 3-year-old venture-backed company selling software that provides interactive voice access to network management and other enterprise applications. Entrieva sells software that works with popular network management platforms including Computer Associates' Unicenter, IBM's Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView along with trouble-ticketing software from Remedy.

When these network management systems report a problem, Entrieva's server-based software determines who the subject-matter expert is, places a call to that person, verifies that person's voice and accepts that person's personal identification number. The expert then can query the network management system and resolve network events with an ongoing voice dialogue. Entrieva's software lets network managers solve problems quickly via the telephone without having to come into the office on nights or weekends.

Behind Entrieva's software is support for two emerging standards that support so-called multimodal communications: VoiceXML 2.0 and Speech Application Language Tags (SALT). Multimodal communications combine speech with more traditional I/O techniques such as text, audio, video or graphics.

VoiceXML is used primarily in telephony applications such as directory access, call routing and call centers. SALT focuses on speech-enabling Web pages for access by telephone users. VoiceXML and SALT are under development by the World Wide Web Consortium, a standards group.

Users of Entrieva's software say the underlying voice processing technology works well.

Entrieva's largest user is the U.S. Army's Military Traffic Management Command, which runs a network that links eight seaports around the globe to its headquarters at Fort Eustis in southern Virginia. The command ships, receives and stores cargo at these ports and transfers it to other ships, trucks and trains. More than 600 desktops are hooked to the command's network, which uses CA's Unicenter as its network management platform.

Several months ago, the command integrated Entrieva's software with Unicenter to let network managers solve network problems remotely by telephone. The command already offered remote access to its network through a VPN, but it found that network managers didn't always have ready access to a PC when a problem arose.

"We had ways for our staff to come into the network via our VPN to do any kind of repair work or recovery work. But you're not always within reach of a workstation to do that," says Dennis Van Langen, director of information management field support for Military Traffic Management Command.