Finding the target: ArrowPoint aims to help make Web content easier to hit

ArrowPoint Communications is making its content-smart switch smarter. The company's switches monitor traffic flow for service providers managing distributed Web sites and helping eliminate those infamous Error 404s that occur when Web content is unavailable. Arrowpoint's original design reroutes content requests to other servers when a server cannot process the requests.

Now the company has added content and application peering protocol (CAPP), content-smart site selector and content-smart redirection. CAPP allows the switches to update information among distributed server sites and share information on content availability and physical proximity. The latter two capabilities let the switches pre-select the best sites to handle content requests and choose from multiple servers before sending requests to the network. The new capabilities will enable more reliable service for Web users and let service providers add quality of service (QOS) features by prioritizing traffic from users.

"Once you have replicated [popular content], you need intelligence that knows how to locate the information and the [QOS] that's required for each request," said Brian Walck, marketing and business development vice president for Arrowpoint. "We want to improve the overall response time of the Web to certain customers."

ArrowPoint's new software allows its switches to monitor and share information on content availability nd server and network loads. By locating the desired content and balancing the load among sites and servers before submitting requests, ArrowPoint believes it can make Web services more efficient.

Integrating the capabilities that ArrowPoint is touting in a single box is an important development, but success is not guaranteed, said Ted Julian, analyst at Forrester Research.

"There's no question it's unique, but the challenge is demonstrating that this stuff is possible," he said. "The expectations they're setting are so high, we'll just have to wait and see."

Point and click is no longer just for e-mail. With Oracle's Internet Messaging, users can access voice mail, faxes and e-mail over the Web. Aimed at service providers with carrier-grade Internet services, enterprises, small businesses and consumers, Internet Messaging provides electronic messaging, directory and scheduling services to standards-based e-mail clients.

In addition to unified messaging, it allows providers to manage their e-mail response and enterprise messaging applications. For example, carriers can use it to improve the customer service they provide through e-mail.

Oracle has been in the messaging market for several years, but it had focused on the work group, said Ranjan Das, group product marketing manager for Oracle's Internet applications group. "We weren't playing to our strength, so we moved toward the enterprise and service provider market. We've taken what we learned from the work group market and applied it to our new product," he said.

Oracle's offering is unusual because it's one of the few targeted at service providers, and it's Web-based, said Kathy Dexter, an analyst with Dataquest. Telia Mobile, a Swedish telecommunications company, is currently offering voice, fax and e-mail in an integrated mailbox accessible on the Web. Users access the voice messages either by downloading an appropriate file format or using streaming audio.

Because of its high cost to deploy and maintain, unified messaging will probably remain a work group application, Dexter said. For Oracle's unified messaging offering to be successful, "service providers will have to target large businesses because it will be too expensive for the average consumer," she said.

Call Sciences, partnering with Oracle, will install and maintain the necessary equipment for carriers. If the service is not popular with consumers, carriers will not have to assume a large technology investment.

"People who have unified messaging don't want to go back, but service providers have to make it affordable for businesses," Dexter said.