20 Tools You Need To Beat The Economy

This is your wake-up call. It's crunch time, not just for the IT industry but for today's economy. Some companies will sit on the sidelines and pout about a slumping economy and reductions in technology spending. The winners will get in the game, and when the going gets tough, the tough need new technology. You've heard wireless technology is hot,but do you know what kind of wireless technology is really blooming and what kind your customers need? Have you heard what predictive failure tools, stress-testing appliances and "honey pots" can do to protect your business? If you haven't, then read on because today what you don't know can kill you. These emerging technologies could be the difference between simply surviving and thriving in crunch time.

AssetCenter

Technology: IT asset-management system

Company: Peregrine Systems

Founded: 1981

CEO: Steve Gardner

It's too easy to lose track of what assets are deployed and where, especially in large companies, or when organizations have merged. That virtual loss of servers, clients, PDAs and other assets is what Peregrine hopes to avoid with new technology it's adding to AssetCenter, its automated asset-management system.

Asset Automated Inventory, based in part on technology it gained through its recent acquisition of Loran Technologies, tightly links business processes to elements in the corporate infrastructure,no matter where they're deployed. The system "pings" network assets and registers data. For clients, it automatically captures information on the operating environment.

"Wireless changes everything about how you manage your assets," says Bill Keyworth, vice president of product marketing at San Diego-based Peregrine. "We're trying to put the tools in place to manage assets even after they've gone beyond the firewall."

Autonomy Content Infrastructure

Technology: Web-based pattern matching algorithms and probability theory

Company: Autonomy

Founded: 1996

CEO: Dr. Michael Lynch

Nothing is a bigger hindrance to using the Web than the simplistic,and frustrating,nature of search engines. Knowing this, San Francisco-based Autonomy, has developed high-performance pattern-matching algorithms and probability theory, providing a comprehensive infrastructure for automating the processing of unstructured information, including Web searches.

"The software is built to be embedded into other applications," says David Appelbaum, Autonomy's CEO for North America. "It enables other software to understand the context of data, so you don't need to have people prepping data before the system can use it."

Because it's pattern-based, the technology is not limited to English, allowing it to search for documents in different languages. The same technology has been adopted by Autonomy in its Autonomy XML Engine to help managers of XML-formatted data reconcile information structured using different tagging schema (like and ) around conceptual similarities.

Bibit

Technology: Single-point, end-to-end Internet payment solution Company: Bibit Founded: 1997

CEO: Joost Schuijff

In the United States, most people have credit cards,which made a payment method for e-commerce easy. But in Europe, where less than 50 percent of the population has credit cards, e-commerce providers are out of luck half the time. The European e-commerce market has been projected as a potential $1.5 trillion market by 2004, but without payment methods, part of this money might be left on the table.

That cultural difference left the door open for Bibit, an Internet payment service provider based in the Netherlands. Bibit provides a single-point, end-to-end Internet payment solution, supporting payment methods that include direct debit, telebanking, WAP-enabled methods, SET-based methods, national card programs and smart cards,more than 45 methods in all.

Bibit's technology is based around high-level agents. These proprietary agents are programmed against XML interfaces through which information on changing exchange rates can be factored into transactions. Local idiosyncrasies, like value- added taxes and local sales taxes, are included in the processing.

Actual payments take place on Bibit's secure servers, relieving companies of the liability and responsibility for handling sensitive financial data. Bibit then distributes the payments to its customers to complete the transactions.

ContentAnywhere

Technology: Content aggregation platform

Company: NQL

Founded: 2000

CEO: Doug Tullio

The company has been around less than two years, but NQL's ContentAnywhere platform, released in February, is aggregating attention as well as it aggregates content.

ContentAnywhere was designed to integrate and manage content for enterprise customers that aggregate data from various sources such as the Internet, databases and legacy systems. The platform integrates data and delivers it to a wide range of destinations such as desktop applications and wireless devices. Content Anywhere also offers customizing capabilities, content naming and a central repository.

"The aim is to give people complex information in a usable format," says Dave Gomez, NQL senior product manager. "Any company that relies on multiple systems can use this product."

The platform is based on NQL's core patent-pending technology network query language (NQL), a scripting language for developing connected applications. The technology reads multiple document types such as XML, HTML and other text files, and transforms and stores the content into XML form. The Santa Ana, Calif.--based company, which has approximately 200 employees, changed its name from Alpha Microsystems in August 2000 to the name of its core technology.

eAssurance

Technology: Server capacity on demand

Company: Peakstone

Founded: 1999

CEO: T.M. Ravi

The infamous "hit storm" syndrome is one Web administrators have heard time and again: traffic spikes, the server crashes and revenue comes to a halt until the problem can be fixed. If capacity could be provisioned on the fly,or better yet, automatically,that scenario could become a thing of the past.

That's the aim of a solution from Peakstone and Microsoft. Peakstone's eAssurance solution, in conjunction with the Microsoft Application Center 2000, lets users automatically clone and replicate servers,and tear them back down,as demand waxes and wanes.

Application Center is based on the idea of software scaling: the process of achieving high-end scalability through Web clusters or Web farms and software rather than with expensive high-end servers. It "allows a vanilla server to become a clone of an application server," says Tom Buiocchi, vice president of marketing at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Peakstone. "We can clone on the fly, then spit the bits into however many servers are needed."

Peakstone provides the "intelligent on-and-off switch," which makes that happen. The Peakstone Command Center conducts call analysis, reporting, service-level setting, resource allocation and real-time service control planning, using statistical modeling based on actual observation of site behavior. "We work with all different tiers of the stack,the load balancer, the application server, the Web server and so on,to see where the bottlenecks are," Buiocchi says.

EEM Suite

Technology: Energy management software

Company: Silicon Energy

Founded: 1997

CEO: John Woolard

An energy shortage and a slumping economy spell trouble for a jittery high-tech industry, but Silicon Energy may very well thrive on such crises.

The company, based in the "blackout state" of California, makes Web-based, energy-management software designed to give businesses more control over energy consumption and costs. Silicon Energy's Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) Suite offers real-time analysis and tracking of energy use as well as cost and meter reporting, alarm notification and peak operation forecasts.

Silicon Energy recently expanded the EEM Suite to include EEM Basic, a solution for small and midsize businesses that includes hosting services and back-office IT support, as well as customized applications.

"EEM Basic is a reduced-function set of software that creates a far broader audience of potential customers," says Allan Schurr, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Silicon Energy.

In addition to enterprise customers grappling with high electricity costs, Silicon Energy is also targeting the energy industry itself. The company has already won the business of Pugent Sound Energy and Northern States Power.

EnterpriseMobility

Technology: Wireless infrastructure

Company: Norwood Systems

Founded: 2000

CEO: Paul Ostergaard

Norwood Systems, a British company, debuted and unveiled its flagship product, EnterpriseMobility, to rave reviews at Comnet 2001 in January. The product, based on the Bluetooth telephony platform, provides a wireless network that integrates voice and data services such as e-mail and messaging, voicemail, wireless phones and office phones. Norwood Systems chairman and CEO Paul Ostergaard says the solution allows users to access information and communicate through one centralized wireless system. "Our strategy is to strip away the difficulties of deploying and integrating wireless," Ostergaard says.

EnterpriseMobility received the Most Innovative New Product Award at Comnet and also captured the wireless category award. The new wireless product also garnered positive reviews from analysts who saw the software suite as an innovative alternative to current office technology such as PBX handsets and other hardware.

Ostergaard says Norwood Systems will now begin focusing on reaching out to VARs with enterprise customers and engaging potential partners in the wireless technology market. EnterpriseMobility is scheduled for release in mid-2001."There's a tremendous amount of momentum in the wireless technology area," Ostergaard says. "We're feeling really good right now."

Eye of the Storm

Technology: Predictive failure tool

Company: Entuity

Founded: 1997

CEO: Joe Collinwood.

Eye of the Storm was developed by Entuity president Jeremy Tracey and CTO Robert Haines while the two were working as network management specialists at Goldman Sachs. The software focuses on network fault and provides real-time monitoring and reporting. Entuity officials say Eye of the Storm is the first intra-LAN solution for managing larger, enterprise-level networks. The product is designed to provide detailed network inventory for thousands of managed ports by collecting and prioritizing degradation events for the network operating center, according to the severity of the events.

Early signs for Eye of the Storm are promising. Last fall, Surebridge deployed the software in its network operating center to monitor and protect the company's hosting systems and, in February, Arthur Andersen chose Eye of the Storm to support its new Infrastructure Management Service.

Code named "Fenway"

Technology: In-depth Web infrastructure monitoring

Company: Dirig Software

Founded: 1997

CEO: Robert F. Hoyt

Making sure the infrastructure for e-business is bulletproof is critical these days, where downtime is measured not in minutes but in money. That's easy to do in old-fashioned networks where the equipment is built around one vendor's hardware, but it can be difficult when environments are built around platforms and application servers from multiple vendors. Enter Nashua, N.H.-based Dirig Software.

Dirig's new product, which still goes by the colorful code name Fenway, provides network managers with the ability to monitor every application function, connection point and component in a system to validate the integrity of each transaction request, execution and completion.

"IT managers require the ability to monitor every detail within a server," says Chris Lesar, vice president of operations at Dirig. "If we catch problems ahead of time, that's great, but when there are problems, we need to provide a quick, in-depth analysis of what went wrong so it won't happen again."

Fenway provides a variety of statistics including the number of Web pages requested by users, error log entries, HTTP response time, application server utilization, number of delayed requests and number of rollbacks. It can also detect Web applications and their components automatically, providing what Lesar calls "plug and play management." The productized version of Fenway should arrive by July 2001.

Groove

Technology: Peer-to-peer platform

Company: Groove Networks

Founded: 1997

CEO: Ray Ozzie

After creating Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie's legacy as a software maestro was ensured. He could have retired, but he wanted more.

Ozzie's new passion is Beverly, Mass.-based Groove Networks, formed more than three years ago, and the product is Groove, unveiled last October. The software platform is based on peer-to-peer architecture that enables two-way multimedia communication. Ozzie conceived the product while trying to find a communication solution that provided more than just simple e-mail but wasn't burdened with a central server.

"Ray saw a great big hole in business communication," says Andrew Mahon, marketing director for Groove Networks. "Groove fills that hole by fitting in between e-mail and Web-based servers."

Groove connects PCs without a central server to create a digital workspace that offers instant messaging, e-mail, multimedia graphics, real-time documentation and co-Web browsing. The decentralized platform is also designed to provide a secure environment.

Groove Networks is backed by heavy hitters, such as Accel Partners and Intel. It reached its 100-partner milestone in less than three months. The commercial version of Groove shipped only a few weeks ago. "Ultimately," Mahon says, "we see everyone having three things,e-mail, a Web-based server and Groove."

IntelliCell

Technology: Smart antenna

Company: ArrayComm

Founded: 1992

CEO: Martin Cooper

ArrayComm officials boast their IntelliCell smart-antenna technology as the first major breakthrough in radio technology in 30 years. That claim isn't so hard to believe when Martin Cooper is running the show. Cooper, a 29-year veteran of Motorola, invented the first portable cellular telephone in 1973 and is recognized as a trailblazer in wireless technology. Last year, Cooper became one of seven charter inductees into the Wireless Hall of Fame.

Cooper formed ArrayComm in 1992 to develop and commercialize smart-antenna technology under the company's IntelliCell product line. Smart- antenna technology focuses the wireless transmission and directs signals from the base station to the user. While conventional base stations indiscriminately funnel the signal out over enormous areas or cells, IntelliCell-powered signals funnel into specific users, reducing interference and signal degradation and improving range and power consumption.

And Silicon Valley-based ArrayComm is concentrating on more than just wireless handsets these days. The company's i-Burst, a portable wireless data system also based on IntelliCell technology, is designed to offer broadband access at data rates of 40 Mbps to users with sustained transfers of more than 1 Mbps per user. Cooper says i-Burst delivers the Internet as it should be,fast, easy and reliable.

ArrayComm has deployed more than 65,000 IntelliCell-powered base stations to date, concentrated mostly in Asia Pacific.

iPrism

Technology: Web-filtering software

Company: St. Bernard Software

Founded: 1995

CEO: John Jones

Web-filtering software has been around for years, but now it has the law on its side. The Child Internet Protection Act, signed into law late in 2000, mandates that schools have a filtering plan in place by the end of 2001, or else they won't receive federal money for technology improvements. Unfortunately, Web filtering software running on general-purpose computers takes resources to install and manage,resources many schools don't have.

St. Bernard Software, based in San Diego, has taken the filtering function to an appliance, thus simplifying the task of management. The current version of its iPrism lets managers configure a single iPrism and have the configuration information replicated across the network to other units.

The appliance is sold along with a subscription to St. Bernard's Enhanced Website Database, a URL database that sorts Web sites into 60 categories. Database updates are automatically sent nightly to the customers' iPrism devices as part of the subscription service, which also provides a potential continuing revenue stream for resellers.

"The big complaint against most simplistic filtering software is it excludes useful content for arbitrary reasons," says John Jones, St. Bernard's president and CEO. "By having people look at the sites, we can classify them with far greater granularity."

ManTrap

Technology: "Honey pot" security technology

Company: Recourse Technologies

Founded: 1999

CEO: Frank Huerta

Recourse Technologies likens its ManTrap software to an old World War II strategy employed by the British military where phony airfields, known as Q-stations, were built as decoy targets for German bombers. The decoy Q-stations worked well for Allied forces, and Redwood City, Calif.-based Recourse aims to duplicate the success with ManTrap for digital businesses.

Known as a "honey pot," the decoy environment acts as a virtual cage, diverting hackers and cybercriminals from the real deal and trapping them in a "pot." ManTrap duplicates an operating system, server or database and continuously generates customized, random content to make the decoy appear genuine.

Originally, honey pots were considered too difficult and expensive to construct, and earlier versions of the technology allowed hackers to sniff a trap because the decoy environments didn't update themselves with current content and information. Now, many experts are embracing advanced honey pots like ManTrap because they not only deflect attention from valuable areas but can also allow users to observe, analyze and track a hacker's behavior. ManTrap isn't a new product,it was released more than two years ago,but with recent high-profile attacks on e-businesses, honey pot technology may finally be ready for the mainstream enterprise market.

Partner Accelerator

Technology: Partner relationship management

Company: OnDemand

Founded: 1997

CEO: Phillip Lavery

Some technologies are aimed at changing life for end users, while others are geared toward changing life for solution providers. Squarely in that second category is OnDemand, a Los Altos, Calif.-based company with a mission to use software to manage the relationships between solution providers and their vendors.

"We can use technology to drive down effective management costs while at the same time provide better and more up-to-date information for the individual," says Phillip Lavery, CEO of OnDemand.

How,through a partner relationship management (PRM) solution aimed at vendors and based around a personalized interface that delivers timely, relevant information.

OnDemand's Partner Accelerator combines software and consulting services to provide a business service tailored to individuals within a solution provider who deal with each vendor. It delivers data to them in

an automated and highly personalized manner through the use of profiling, content management and business intelligence technologies. Those technologies are applied to aspects of the partnerships, such as communications, lead development and marketing development funds.

The data is provided through a personalized Web site generated by OnDemand and customized to appear as a vendor's own unique, channel-focused site.

"We're not trying to replace relationships," says Kapi Attawar, vice president of marketing at OnDemand. "What we're doing is acknowledging that each vendor and partner now has many more companies to keep track of, and we're making it easier for our customers to get to the important parts of those relationships."

Probester

Technology: Web-site measurement

Company: SolidSpeed Networks

Founded: 2000

CEO: Neil Dueweke

SolidSpeed Networks, Ann Arbor, Mich., is hoping to make Web site performance measurement an exact science.

SolidSpeed Networks started out a year ago as a content delivery network provider, but it's the company's Web performance measurement software that's attracting the most attention now.

Probester, launched in February, is a patent-pending data engine that tracks Web site performance through a "Napster-like" model that uses thousands of connected PCs in a P2P network. The software distributes URLs to the network for measurement and each PC reports results back to the Probester server. The large number of computers used prevents downloading speed from being manipulated by caching tricks, and the software measures Web site performance from the desktop rather than an internal Internet location, which can also produce misleading results.

Probester has received positive feedback from Beta testers and analysts, and now SolidSpeed is gearing up to take on larger competitors. The company has gained strong allies in just one year,with financial backing from Arbor Venture Partners II and partnerships with Cisco and IBM.

Q

Technology: Mobile data storage

Company: Agate Technologies

Founded: 1996

CEO: Francis Khoo

Agate's name comes from the precious mineral agate, so it's only natural that president and COO John Madigan calls the company's hot-swap technology "rock-solid." Its mobile storage and management products are aimed at replacing floppy disks and other standard IDE peripherals. The hot-swap software powers storage devices designed to transfer data easily and without the need for special ports or drives.

Agate calls its latest hot-swap product, Q, the smallest removable hard drive in the world. The storage device, based on Flash memory, is about the size of the pinky finger and serves as a portable auxiliary hard file for any USB-enabled PC. Released in December by ei Corp., an Agate company, Q is designed to provide between 16 MB and 128 MB, depending on the model.

Other hot,swap products include ei Hot Data Shuttle, a device that lets users swap storage units without rebooting or loading drivers, as well as ei Data Disaster Recovery Systems and ei ProSwap software, which protect hard drives.

Agate's best market for hot-swap is Asia Pacific, but the company plans to focus on Europe and North America this year.

SecureReward

Technology: E-commerce loyalty platform

Company: Netcentives

Founded: 1993

Chairman: West Shell

A "loyalty solution" may sound far-fetched, but Netcentives may soon make it as common a term as e-business solutions.

Netcentives, a San Francisco-based e-marketing solution provider founded in 1993, has capitalized on the economic downturn and high-tech slump with its e-commerce loyalty platform, dubbed SecureReward. The technology, which powers specialized products like RewardBroker 2.5 and MaxMiles, creates a management infrastructure, allowing companies to reward employees, customers and business partners.

Last fall, the company introduced its Employee Reward System, a solution that lets corporations reward employees in real-time through a Web-based network. Nortel Networks implemented it to power its PRIDE program for more than 70,000 employees.

"Companies are now looking for different technology and services to help deepen and maximize relationships with their stakeholders," says Netcentives' chairman West Shell. "Up until now, the only choices companies had [for loyalty solutions] were paper-based systems or very expensive legacy systems. Companies know they need to build these solutions, but they don't know how to go about executing it."

Netcentives has also developed reward-aggregation systems for America Online, American Express, American Airlines, Excite and Microsoft.

WebAvalanche

Technology: Appliance-based, Web stress testing

Company: Caw Networks

Founded: 1999

CEO: Andrew Foss

Stress-testing Web sites to their full capacity is such an involved process that most sites never get pushed to their limits. Setting up a laboratory scenario to inundate a site with hits used to rely on the use of multiple general-purpose computers, an expensive approach that doesn't really approximate real life. After all, a site doesn't get traffic from only a few computers, but rather from many computers using many methods of connectivity.

That problem is at the core of Caw Networks' WebAvalanche, a stress-testing appliance that replicates the kind of high volume traffic a site can expect to receive. The appliance provides a view of what a site's behavior will be "right at the red line," says Andrew Foss, Caw's president and CEO.

WebAvalanche can simulate the full load, randomness and unpredictability of the Internet. "Prior to WebAvalanche, we've had no cost-effective or reliable way to assess Web site performance realistically," Foss says. "By Internet realism, we mean huge numbers of concurrent TCP/IP connections, each appearing to come from a different IP address, network latencies associated with different user connection speeds, HTTP cancellations, resets, long connections, dropped packets and bursty traffic."

The appliance isn't cheap,it starts at $48,500. But,

Foss says, that cost is significantly less than the cost of hiring staff and designing a software-based system to do the sort of complex simulation that the WebAvalanche appliance

performs. "It's a complex programming exercise to get that to work," Foss says. "That's why we've packaged that expertise in

the form of an appliance."

XyLoc Enterprise Suite

Technology: Wireless security tokens

Company: Ensure Technologies

Founded: 1997

Chairman and chief technologist: Dr. Thomas Xydis

Studies show that people are more mobile than ever. Wireless technology, especially wireless LANs and personal area networking, will lead to even more mobility within the office. The problem: If workers are moving around, they may well leave their logged-on client devices unattended, introducing holes into otherwise secure networking environments.

"After authorization, the network has no way of knowing who's in front of the system," says George Brostoff, president and founder of Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Ensure. "The entry point has always been the weakness."

To overcome this problem, Ensure Technologies has developed XyLoc, a security tool that itself uses wireless technology. The XyLoc Enterprise Suite centers around small, pager-sized fobs or ID badges. Those simple devices serve as keys and connect wirelessly through an encrypted two-way radio link to a lock that attaches to the client device. In early versions, RF or infrared were used to make the connection between key and lock; new versions will use Bluetooth.

When a user approaches a XyLoc-secured computer, the key transmits a unique encrypted code to the lock and the lock relays the information to the XyLoc management server, which checks the data against an encrypted database. If the user is authorized, the XyLoc system unlocks the keyboard and screen; if unauthorized, the system remains secured.

Should the user move away from the device, the link between the lock and key is broken and access is terminated, making sure that an unattended device won't become a security problem.

Zuite XSP Integration Appliance

Technology: Hardware-based Web application integration Company: InfoTone Founded: 1998

CEO: Avery Moon

The integration of legacy, outsourced and Web-based applications and data is an 80/20 process, meaning that 80 percent of the work is the same from job to job with the remaining 20 percent being the unique, customized work. So, why not take the knowledge that makes up the 80 percent and put it somewhere that will allow it to be applied automatically?

That's the thinking of Infotone, Emeryville, Calif. "Instead of reinventing the wheel in every case, we let them use our appliance to automate those tasks," says Avery Moon, InfoTone's CEO.

The company's Zuite XSP Integration Appliance is based on "Bizlets," a software technology, which provides a Java-compatible framework that lets applications share data and business rules across all popular Internet-enabled platforms. Since Bizlets can be upgraded and then deployed automatically, they can grow as the other frameworks evolve, and the updates can be used as the basis for a source of equity revenue for resellers.

The Bizlet framework supports everything from Microsoft and Oracle SQL servers to Enterprise Java Beans and SOAP and supports both wizard-based and code-based development. The Bizlet framework is housed in the appliance itself, a hardware platform that can be managed remotely.

InfoTone aims to make Web-based integration and custom applications economically feasible for small and midsize businesses. "Big companies have no problem hiring people who can do these tasks," Moon says, "but smaller companies have the same sort of needs to