Epicentric, Inc., publicly previewed its portal solution enabling companies to build custom enterprise portals for intranets, extranets and the Internet at Demo ’99. The Epicentric solution delivers ownership of corporate portals from a hosting, branding and design perspective. The company will provide its portal solution as either an enterprise server or hosted service and also license aggregation technology to vertical portal sites on the Web. Epicentric expects to ship its portal server in the second quarter of 1999. Beta sites include enterprise customers such as the United States Postal Service (USPS), BAAN and Philips that will be deploying the product server in both intranet and extranet settings. Epicentric’s technology takes advantage of emerging XML-based standards such as the Document Object Model (DOM) and allows the server to easily communicate with any existing information source. Additionally, Epicentric is a member of the W3C and the Information & Content Exchange (ICE) Advisory Council, a standards body launched to facilitate content exchange. www.epicentric.com
Day: February 8, 1999
CAP Ventures Inc., announced the industry’s first market study on early adopters of XML. The formal announcement and study scope was unveiled at Documation ’99 West in Santa Clara, CA. The study is a project of CAP Ventures’ Dynamic Content Software Strategies Consulting Service (DSS). The research phase of the project is currently in progress. The study will provide vital market information to software vendors and service providers. In addition, it will prove useful for end-user companies who are evaluating the viability of XML projects. The research will uncover user motivations for employing XML, identify the corporate applications it will be used for most frequently by early adopters, and estimate spending on XML projects through 1999. It will also gauge the industry standards and vocabularies related to XML in which users are most interested. Data for the study will be collected through 250 telephone interviews with companies that have XML-based IT projects either planned or underway. www.capv.com/dss
IntraNet Solutions, Inc., announced its financial results for the third quarter ended Dec. 31, 1998. Total revenues for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 1998 decreased to $2.5 million from $5.0 million in the prior year’s quarter as a result of divesting the company’s hardware integration group. Increases of $649, 078 in software, technical services and support revenues were offset by a decrease in hardware integration group revenues of $3.1 million. Loss from continuing operations was $132,057 or $0.01 per share. This compared to a loss from continuing operations of $122,268 or a loss of $0.02 per share in the prior year’s quarter. Total revenues for the nine months ended Dec. 31, 1998 decreased to $11.0 million from $14.6 million in the prior year period. Increases of $1.7 million in software, technical services and support revenues were offset by a decrease in hardware integration group revenues of $5.3 million. Loss from continuing operations was $355,072, which included a gain of $516,934 from the sale of the hardware integration unit, or a loss of $0.04 per share. This compared to a loss from continuing operations of $1,002,016, or a loss of $0.13 per share in the prior year period. www.intranetsol.com
MINT Communication Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Oshap Technologies Ltd. and a provider of Enterprise Application Integration solutions to the financial services industry, announced support for XML. Financial institutions are adopting XML as a new standard because its flexible structure can simplify and speed the process of integrating and transmitting complex financial information between banks, securities firms, and clearing networks. The MINT/Rule Manager Module allows users to import and export XML metadata, and to integrate the data with other financial applications and industry standards like FIX and SWIFT, avoiding the time and cost for manually re-defining and transforming message formats. www.mintech.com
POET Software Corporation announced the completion of a $9.9 million financing round. POET Holdings, Inc., the parent company for the POET group, received $6 million in equity investments in exchange for “Preferred Series D” shares in December 1998 from both new and existing investors. New investors include Private Equity Bridge Invest Ltd.(PEBI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Private Equity Holding AG of Zug, Switzerland, and the German Technologie-Beteiligungs-Gesellschaft bmH (“tbg”). Previous investors who also participated in the “Preferred Series D” financing are European Technologieholding, Sigma Partners, El Dorado Ventures, INNOVACOM I, Atlas Venture Europe Fund BV, and Lawrence Owen Brown. In addition, tbg invested $3.9 million through a convertible long-term note. www.poet.com
QuickStream Software, Inc. announced three new interfaces to its Java-based DocCentral document management system. The QuickStream Developers Kit (QDK), Open Document Management API (ODMA) and HTML Interface are available for beta testing with a scheduled commercial release in March. Providing a base for the other interfaces, the QDK allows the creation of custom functions on top of the DocCentral application. The QDK is a set of simple Java functions that can be integrated into Java applications and Java applets. Developers can use the QDK to create customized features and incorporate them into DocCentral. Individually, the DocCentral server software is $2,950.00, the Java-based Director client is $495.00 and the HTML-based Associate client is $49.95. The small work group twenty-five user bundle includes Java server software, four Director clients and twenty-one Associate clients for $4,995.00. The large work group fifty user bundle is $8,995.00 and includes Java server software, ten Director clients and forty Associate clients. QuickStream also offers a “Get Started” bundle that can be downloaded from its website at www.quickstream.com
LexiQuest, Inc., announced a strategic reseller agreement with Verity, Inc. Under the terms of the agreement Verity will resell LexiQuest technology and products through the Verity sales force. The agreement gives Verity customers access to LexiQuest’s linguistic technology. The LexiQuest technology allows people to use everyday language to create search requests for Verity Knowledge Retrieval systems. These two technologies combine to give many types of users with different levels of skill and training tools to achieve results across a broad array of information resources. Because the LexiQuest technology includes a customizable linguistic knowledge base, it can be tuned to understand language that is specific to a given industry or discipline. The technology provides an intelligent linguistic interface that is easy for non-researchers to use. www.verity.com, www.lexiquest.com
Sequoia Software Corp. and Impact Innovations Corp. (IMPACT) today announced formation of a strategic marketing and development agreement. The relationship will enable Impact Innovations, a VAR and integrator of information technology, to resell and create new product packages with Sequoia Interchange98 (i98) or to use it in integration projects. Under the licensing agreement with Sequoia, IMPACT will be a direct distribution channel for Interchange98 providing training, technical support, marketing and sales. The agreement takes effect immediately. i98 provides a distributed XML and document repository, data distribution and replication services, XML publishing, XML data entry, standardized security, and workflow with content-based routing. www.sequoiasw.com, www.iiginc.com
