THE CUTTING EDGE: SPECIAL REPORT : O.C. Software Firm Finds a Quick, On-Line Solution
When a client’s software glitch in Cuxhaven, Germany, threatened to delay shipping along the Elbe River near Hamburg last spring, programmers at Wonderware Corp.’s Orange County headquarters immediately began looking for a fix late that same evening, Hamburg time.
The programmers examined copies of the software code that a company engineer in Cuxhaven downloaded to them in Irvine via Compuserve, one of a half-dozen on-line services that allow computer users to exchange electronic mail and review data.
The troubled program was used to convert analog radar signals into digital form so they could be read by a computer that monitored ship traffic. Several hours later, the faulty program was corrected and returned to Germany.
Before Wonderware began using the on-line service in September, 1993, such a repair would have taken days of shipping disks across the Atlantic by express mail.
“You can answer questions from Germany or Japan about 10 minutes after you get them,” said Rashesh Mody, a Wonderware manager for technical support. Before it began using Compuserve, he said, “we sometimes sent faxes back and forth, but you can’t keep track of all the information in that form.”
For software companies that have come to depend on such on-line services to distribute and update their products, choosing among providers like Compuserve, Prodigy Services Co. and America Online Inc. has become as important as choosing among competing long-distance telephone companies.
Some companies are tied more directly to the Internet to respond to customers’ inquiries and stay in touch with far-flung sales representatives. The Internet is a worldwide computing standard that links more than 3 million computers.
Like many Orange County software companies, Wonderware has a foot in each camp--a subscription to an on-line service as well as a customized Internet address registered in the company’s own name.
Ken Forster, a Wonderware project manager, said the company’s presence on the Internet and on Compuserve has been beneficial. “We had two factions arguing which was the better way to go, so we decided to do both,” he said. Much of the company’s software repairs and updates are shipped through its Compuserve account, while the company’s Internet address--which is maintained through another provider--Netcom On-line Communication Services Inc. in San Francisco--is available to greater numbers of Wonderware’s customers.
With an added on-line dependence, Forster and other on-line managers are considering a possible market shake-up in 1995, driven by the introduction of a new service by software giant Microsoft Corp., based in Redmond, Wash. The Microsoft Network will allow PC users to go on-line directly through its popular Windows program, which is installed on nearly 60 million computers and is seen as serious competition for the established service providers like Compuserve, Prodigy and America Online.
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Despite the attention Microsoft has received since announcing its service at Comdex, the giant trade show in Las Vegas last month, local business users say they don’t expect the network will drastically affect their own operations. The competition among service providers, they say, will rest on which can provide more access to the Internet itself.
Microsoft’s network “is another service we’ll definitely have to look at,” said Bruce Quigley, director of sales and marketing at Smith Micro Software Inc. in Aliso Viejo. “I’d have to see it in use before I can say whether we’d want to be on it or not. It has to do with what our customer base wants too.”
The privately held company, with about 75 employees, already has two employees to handle technical support inquiries on its Compuserve account, he said, and is considering setting up additional support service through America Online and Apple Computer’s electronic service.
Microsoft isn’t discussing specifics of its service, though trade journals suggest the network initially will only allow users to send and receive e-mail via the ‘net and to participate in discussion groups.
“If they don’t have good Internet access, they’re toast,” said Mark Jenkins, an editor at Interactive Week, a trade journal in Garden City, N.Y.
Whereas the leading service providers today charge fees based on the time users are connected, Microsoft may base its fees on how much information users download or how much mail they transmit, Jenkins said.
As in other areas of the United States, interest in the Internet is increasing exponentially in Orange County as measured by the number of companies that have registered a name on the network through the Internet Network Information Center, a project funded by the National Science Foundation.
For the 714 telephone area code, 218 new commercial names were registered this year through Nov. 15, compared with just 81 names for all of 1993, according to Michael J. Walsh, president of Internet Info, a market research firm in Falls Church, Va., that analyzes the registrations.
“It’s almost like taking a snapshot of the United States and saying, ‘These are the high-tech centers,’ ” Walsh said. “It’s got nothing to do with the geography; it’s got everything to do with the high-techishness of the regions.”
For every name registered, there can be dozens or more actual users. The largest cluster of Internet users in Orange County is connected through UC Irvine. David Walker, assistant director of the UCI office of academic computing, estimates about half of the school’s 16,000 students and as many as two-thirds of its 5,000 faculty and staff have individual accounts. Because all those accounts have the same ending designation--”uci.edu.”--they would be counted just once by most surveys of users, making it difficult to calculate exact demographics.
Because businesses on the network tend to be smaller, however, the number of names ending in “com,” the designation for commercial or business users, makes the InterNIC count a helpful measure of business use.
“It correlates to the fact that the most commercial stuff is being done in California,” said Allen Weiner, principal analyst for on-line strategies at Dataquest Inc., a San Jose-based market research firm. “A lot of them are just homesteading, staking a claim, putting up their fence post . . . but they’re hoping that somebody who’s surfing (the Internet) is going to find them.”
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Because there is no cost to register a name, some analysts suggest that the rush of new registrations is partially a defensive move by companies to prevent others from capturing their brand name. Two of the best-known cases involved individuals who registered “coke.com” and “mtv.com” to themselves. In another case, a competitor to the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center registered “kaplan.com” as its own name.
On-line managers in Orange County say they don’t know of local instances of trade names being poached. Of the commercial addresses registered to companies or individuals in Orange County, the majority belong to computer hardware or software companies, such as AST Research Inc. in Irvine (“ast.com”), Filenet Corp. (“filenet.com”) in Costa Mesa and Ingram Micro Inc. (“ingram.com”) in Santa Ana.
One local address that is not registered to a computer company is “medicaldata.com,” acquired last May by Medical Data International Inc. of Irvine, an information consulting company that works with medical equipment manufacturers and health care providers.
Kevin Hicks, an information technology manager there, said 25 to 50 messages are transmitted each day between the company’s 41 on-site employees, five off-site consultants and researchers, and its customers and readers. About half of its message traffic is between its 46 employees, the other half between employees and customers.
“The medical industry is pretty unsavvy about computers in general,” he said. He said he’s not surprised it’s mostly software firms that have most addresses now, but that may change as biomedical companies and other industries set up accounts.
Hicks said his company plans to make more services available to customers early next year, which would allow customers to view catalogues or navigate public databases.
Another user looking to increase its services on the network is Zyxel Corp., an Anaheim modem manufacturer that uses its Internet connection to answer user questions and to offer free upgrades of its software.
Brent Mosbrook, a Zyxel engineer, said reduced mailing costs and faster response for customers are the main benefits of having an on-line presence.
“People don’t want to have to set aside time to call us, they want the convenience of being able to post a question, then come back and look at the response a day later,” he said.
Mosbrook and others must balance that convenience against the security issues of opening their computers to the prowlers who could be drawn to an Internet address. The company is hoping to install an on-line ordering system as soon as protocols for protecting information transmitted on the Internet are developed, he said.
“It’s more than just credit card numbers; I want the whole order to be secure,” Mosbrook said. “I don’t want anybody sniffing in there to see that (Internet) traffic.”
Only the gradual adoption of privacy measures for the Internet is likely to change the minds of Internet skeptics, said Donald Douglas Jolley, a networking consultant in Laguna Beach.
“If you’re dealing with communications between two companies on a bulletin board-style system like Compuserve, you don’t have the problems of your message traffic lying around on several different computers,” Jolley said. “If you’re strictly talking about communicating company to company, that’s an advantage to using a service provider in preference to the Internet.
“The Internet’s advantage is that it’s a common denominator, so you’ll be able to hear from anybody who wants to send you mail . . . and I’m not sure that the smaller businesses, other than the software houses, are ready for what the Internet has to offer, beyond e-mail.”
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Internet Growth
More than 50 area codes have in excess of 100 commercial Internet addresses--called domains--registered with InterNic, Internet’s administrative center. Here’s how Orange County stacks up against other local area codes as of Nov. 15:
Location (area code)
San Diego (619): 543 Central Los Angeles (310): 414 Orange County (714): 352 East Los Angeles, Pasadena, San Fernando (818): 301 West Los Angeles (213): 140 San Bernardino, Riverside (909): 56
Top Internet States
More than two-thirds of the 25,000 are in ten states. California is home to more than one-quarter of them. Top 10 states with Internet commercial domains (with percent of total):
California: 5,287 (28.7%) Colorado: 1,260 (6.8)% Massachusetts: 1,227 (6.6)% New York: 1,179 (6.4)% Texas: 982 (5.3)% Virginia: 713 (3.8)% Illinois: 619 (3.3)% New Jersey: 595 (3.2)% Washington: 546 (2.9)% Pennsylvania: 504 (2.7)%
Net Growth
The increase in the number of commercial addresses has skyrocketed throughout Southern California over the past three years. Even for 909, a code that did not exist until 1991, there has been extensive growth:
Area code 1991 1992 1993 1994 714 14 35 81 218 310 13 37 74 284 818 20 25 68 187 213 7 10 20 103 909 1 5 10 40 619 15 50 104 368
Sources: Internet Info, Falls Church, Va. Researched by VALERIE WILLIAMS-SANCHEZ / Los Angeles Times.
