Saturday, February 01, 2003

MESSAGE INTERCEPT: It's hard to believe that it's been almost two years, to the day, that Ray wrote a piece for Ziff-Davis entitled, "A Modest Proposal" where he introduced the idea of VPNAP's, short for "virtual private network application platform". It was his observation that while corporations were centralized, their operations were becoming massively decentralized. Speed of formation and the instantiation of virtual workspaces linking teams across enterprises and value chains would define the winners. But the requirement to deploy VPN drivers, redundant data communications infrastructure, and ongoing support costs to insure secure interactions was inhibiting the corporate need-for-speed. Worse, the drag of IT mediation of business connectivity was forcing real knowledge workers to use alternate channels of communications which were non-optimized for getting the job done, and inherently non-secure. A secure collaborative application platform that allowed the business user 'always-on" encryption and authentication services at the application layer, while riding on commodity, massively available, pervasive infrastructure (the internet) would define business nirvana. All of this was achievable then, as it is now. Many weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to a new company AnyAtWeb, which sells a product offered up as (language from their site), "powerful software specifically designed to capture, monitor and record Internet activities in the network. It records any web pages viewed, files downloaded and emails sent and received through any computers [sic] in the network. It captures HTTP-related and email-related packages on the LAN and decodes the packages into web pages, files and emails exactly as the original one [sic]". I can assure you that this product isn't marketed to the CIO at Groove. Anyone can buy this, deploy it on the work PC, and begin monitoring with all results pumped nicely into an Outlook client. I can see who is talking to who, the files they are downloading, and the web sites they are accessing. As a result of all of this, I've been thinking a lot about secure messaging lately. Most of our customers are talking about this and are turning to Groove for answers. There is this realization that shimming a security layer onto the corporate email system isn't enough. Rather, there is great appeal in leveraging a virtual space platform that provides a common, JIT, auto-negotiated, always-on security infrastructure that facilitates rapidly forming teams who want to share personal data, but also enterprise data. A platform that allows existing applications to levarage true secure XML message switching at the app layer while using non-secure pipes, even for our internal data communications infrastructures. Any@Web's "innovation" makes Ray's idea of February 13, 2001 look even more appealing now. 10:01:31 PM

HEAR MY PLEA?!  Is it possible that the Sonic Blue people heard my plea?  Doubtful, but I was pleased to see this in a Reuters feed today: "Both SonicBlue Inc. (NasdaqNM:SBLU - news) and TiVo (news - web sites) Inc. (NasdaqNM:TIVO - news) said they would update their digital video recorders this year with new software and networking features that would also let them pull photos and music from PCs on home networks." NOW, if we could just reverse that API (my PC accessing the ReplayTV box using WIFI or wired network).  So close... 9:40:40 PM