Alberg to foray into enterprise P2P space

Current e-Business trends and importance of partnership strategies have brought forth the need for new capabilities, which an enterprise has to develop. Hybrid Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures are being proposed as solutions to these enterprise needs. Alberg Software, a Hyderabad based software development company has developed a new enterprise- targeted P2P platform. Christened - Hive, the platform is ideally suitable for developing new collaborative application based on Sun's JXTA technology.

Zia Askari of CNS spoke to R Balasundaram, Technical Director for

Alberg.

What is the prime focus of the organization as of now?

Alberg is focussing itself as a company offering innovative tools, products and services to meet tomorrow's global needs. The company provides e-business tools, products and software services to global clientele. The company specializes in software solutions based on open standard technologies using technology neutral design and technology neutral platform. 


The business challenges of today are being driven by rapidly changing technologies. The Internet is redefining the ways of doing business. The growing competition in the digital age and continuously evolving technology changes demands shorter time to market solutions. At present we are concentrating on the release of our new product called 'Hive' a Hybrid architecture for enterprise P2P. We are going to release the product in the market early next month.

What is the technology behind the peer-to-peer product-Hive?

Hive is an enterprise P2P platform for developing new, collaborative application based on JXTA P2P platform. It provides a Java Messaging service middle-ware, which enables non-JXTA clients such as browsers to interact with a JXTA client. In the Hive framework, each servlet in a website is also registered as a topic in a JMS server. When an event occurs in the website such as a customer filling a particular data in a form, it is published in the JMS server. All the interested parties to that particular event who have subscribed receive the message that an event has occurred.

Hive uses JMS as a standard layer over the JXTA Peer-to-peer platform. The advantage is that applications, which run on this platform, can be easily ported to other P2P platforms and standard JMS based applications. The product's applications also have the ability to talk with non-JXTA based clients also.

Each Hive client has an integrated servlet engine and Microsoft Internet explorer component. End-users have a HTML based rich user-interface, which runs on their local machine. Hive clients connect to the local server for personal information management like scheduling, todo, contact management etc and they connect to the central web-servers for other functionalities seamlessly.

How is Hive different from other similar applications?

What sets Hive apart from similar client-server platforms such as lotus notes is the absence of a central server for regulating processes or sorting data. Hive comes with a set of tools for discussion, instant messaging, file sharing, calendering etc are provided. Individuals rather than the system administrators or people with specialized knowledge install and get started with hive. Inviting other people to join in the conversation is as sending an email or an instant message.

The product is designed to detect client within its local network (enterprise wide). From the user experience perspective, the absence of a central server hugely simplifies the cumbersome of administrative barriers that are associated with joining.

What is the market segment that you are looking out for your product and how are you planning to market it in the Indian sub-continent?

Basically we are targeting those enterprises where there is a need for a seamless flow of information. As an initial initiative the Beta 1 version of the product is offered free of cost to the desired organizations. This move would create inroads for us inside the Indian enterprise market. Workflow and enterprise/B2B integration are two of major areas where P2P is expected to make the biggest impact within the e-business environment.

The company plans to market the platform on a license basis for enterprises. Though the market for enterprise P2P is still in its nascent stage we are talking to some major corporates including a bank in UK for licensing the product.

What kind of revenue model would you be having for such a product?

Initially we are offering this product as a free download from our website www.alberg.com. By early next year the product would be made available on an ASP model. We have not yet decided the fee for this product but we would definitely decide that taking in view the current situation in the IT scenario and the other conditions in the sub-continent.

What are the other products and areas that you are working on at present?

Alberg is a Hyderabad based multinational software house providing technology applications and tools in the enterprise e-Business space. Apart from Hyderabad the company has got its presence spread across US, UK, Singapore, Australia, Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan. We have also developed an application development tool called

'Applese'.

Basically it is a rapid-enterprise application development tool that uses UML standards based virtual modeling system to automatically generate platform and technology independent codes for client as well as server-side applications. As an end-to-end e-Business development platform, it works on the principles of "ontology" based code generation technologies at a higher level of abstraction. The product is aimed at simplifying the challenges of distributed system integration and offers multi-platform systems integration with XML messaging using SOAP.