AS A STARTUP company expecting to use the Internet to facilitate interactions among companies and their customers, 3Path uses a new dedicated online service that makes use of push technology from BackWeb on a peer-to-peer service model. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, CEO Brian Smiga explains why this new type of service makes sense for any company that relies on the Internet to interact with customers.

InfoWorld: How do you describe 3Path?

Smiga: 3Path's vision is to enable priority channels between businesses and their best customers in order to deliver critical documents and content. The reason we're called 3Path is that if you're in business and you want to deliver priority content to your best customers electronically, you've really got only two channels. You can build a private extranet for each customer, or you can send them e-mail attachments. By themselves we think these are inadequate channels or paths to the customer. So we're a supplement to e-mail and extranets that essentially gives you a private dedicated pipe to your customer. We're a service that enables you to invite your customer to give you a branded space on their hard drive into which you can deliver documents in an organized way with notification, tracking, security, and other features.

InfoWorld: Sounds like an electronic equivalent of a Federal Express package.

Smiga: It is like the electronic equivalent of a FedEx, exactly. It's just that simple.

InfoWorld: What's the compelling business value for this approach?

Smiga: The problem with building private extranets for each and every customer is that it's expensive. Research also shows that your average business consumer goes to only seven Web sites on a recurring weekly basis. If you look over people's shoulders you'll see they have 30 bookmarks, but they really keep going back to only five or six or seven. Worse yet, your extranet can't deliver to your customers who are on notebooks when they're disconnected or when they're on dial-up connections, and 40 percent of your audience is on a dial-up or notebook computer. And finally, a Web site can't deliver perishable information effectively -- the problem is that almost all the information you have is perishable.

InfoWorld: Why not just rely on e-mail?

Smiga: Everybody resorts to some type of e-mail notification or e-mail attachments. The problem with e-mail attachments is that e-mail is coming at a faster and faster rate. Fifty a day is the average today for your target customer. That rate will double every two years, and there's no end in sight. For any document that's worth more than two minutes of consideration, it's just a bad environment for a document that you need to read, that you need to digest, that you need to sign, that you need to act on, or that you need to act on later. And with audio, video, and other large files, there's a lot of pain around delivering large, perishable documents with notification.

InfoWorld: This sounds vaguely like a peer-to-peer application for documents?

Smiga: It's kind of like a peer-to-peer play. It's like a reverse reliable Napster, in that you're getting space on someone's hard drive into which you can push documents with notification. We think peer-to-peer is exciting because it's enabling the edge resources of the Internet to be more fully utilized. We like to compare ourselves to Napster only in that instead of being able to pull resources from people's compputers on an invited basis, we enable you to push resources to computers on a reliable and invited basis.

InfoWorld: What would prevent a company like Federal Express or even the U.S. Postal Service from offering this same type of service?

Smiga: First of all, they haven't been that successful in building their own technologies or even in licensing them to others and turning them into profitable services. So I'd say this is a discontinuous innovation. They're going to have to license a partner or work with another company to make that happen.

InfoWorld: What kind of infrastructure did you build to support this service?

Smiga: We went out and we licensed BackWeb push technology. We basically take BackWeb and do three things with it. First, we host it on an ASP [application service provider] model: You can rent as much as you need. Second, because BackWeb works on a broadcast model, we can turn it into a peer-to-peer model. It's not literally peer-to-peer architecturally, but it's peer-to-peer just as e-mail or instant messaging appears to be peer-to-peer. Third, we built our own IP and our own application on a platform that other people can build on top of. We have central directory services and control, but we have distributed content transports that we can put on content servers all over the world.

InfoWorld: So what would you define as a killer application for your service?

Smiga: I think CRM [customer relationship management] and sales-force automation are perfect applications for us. BackWeb enables a large company to communicate product information to a distributed field sales force. We enable companies to do that on an outsourced model and enable each node that was getting the product information in turn to become a publisher to his or her best customers.

» posted by ITworld staff

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