August 4, 1997

Pushing Outside The Enterprise Companies begin to tap push technology's potential as a sales and marketing tool By Clinton Wilder and Justin Hibbard ush technology, hyped as a new-wave delivery tool for news and information, is gaining momentum in the corporate enterprise for more productive applications-to boost sales, broaden marketing, and tweak internal processes. Lufthansa German Airlines will launch a service this month that uses push technology to alert consumers to fare discounts. Next week, florist FTD, mail-order catalog company Fingerhut, and chocolatier Godiva will begin using a push channel to sell their products online. Healtheon Corp., a startup that manages health-care benefits over the Internet, plans to use push technology to distribute reports internally and to outsiders. On the vendor side, push technology pioneer PointCast Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., will enter the E-commerce market this fall by using the OM-Transact 3.0 server from Open Market Inc. to enable payment processing and online digital coupons. Although many companies already use push technology to broadcast information to employees on intranets, some are just starting to tap its potential for external applications, particularly as an online marketing tool. "It turns traditional marketing upside down," says Roland Conrady, VP of new media at Lufthansa, in Cologne, Germany. "A customer subscribing to our channel will receive exactly the information he is looking for. There's no better way of marketing." Lufthansa's planned launch of a pushed airfare-discount alert service, based on BackWeb Channel Software from BackWeb Technologies Inc. in San Jose, Calif., is the first phase of what the airline hopes will be an extensiv e push strategy. The world's fourth-largest airline is eyeing the technology to sell open seats on short notice and create private channels for travel agents and corporate customers. Some U.S. airlines now send E-mail alerts to subscribers about weekend discount fares and other specials, but Lufthansa says push technology is more effective and less obtrusive. "Nobody knows all the E-mail addresses of all potential customers," says Susana Clementin, technical manager for the new media group at Lufthansa. "And we would flood the in-boxes of these people with messages they did not ask for. This is not what you expect from a friendly company." FTD, Fingerhut, and Godiva will begin using a push channel called Modern Shopper from Targeted Multimedia to embellish their online sales. Targeted Multimedia, a systems integrator in Owings Mills, Md., will use BackWeb's server to alert customers to discounts on products that match their prespecified interests. Analysts like the concept. "As a customer, I'm much mo re likely to value a service that is truly defined to my needs," says Beth Enslow, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Another advocate of push technology for business use is Fruit of the Loom Inc., which built its own push application for its Activewear Online extranet for distributors and T-shirt screen printers. When printers log on from a Web browser, says CIO Robert Heise, they are alerted to changes in inventory of prespecified shirt sizes, styles, and colors at the distributors located closest to them. Fruit of the Loom, in Bowling Green, Ky., manages the distributors' inventories in an Oracle7 database using OneServer from Connect Inc. for order processing. Healtheon, in Palo Alto, Calif., plans to push reports out to its partners, which include employers and health insurance companies such as Blue Cross of California. "We expect to have hundreds, if not thousands, of employers accessing information this way," says John Simpson, product marketing manager with Healtheon, founded by Netscape Communications chairman Jim Clark. Healtheon uses a client-server reporting system from Actuate Software Corp. in San Mateo, Calif., to create reports on health-benefit eligibility, enrollment, and costs. It makes the reports available to partners as printed documents or in HTML format. Healtheon has tested a push version of the Actuate system called ReportCast, which is in beta testing at 20 companies and is due by October. Simpson says he expects corporate customers to request that 15 to 20 reports be pushed their way each week. Montgomery Securities in San Francisco will use ReportCast to distribute reports internally and to outsiders. Chief technology officer Fred Winograd says the technology can distribute transaction summaries, market data, and account information to customers and partners, all of whom now log on to a virtual private network to pull reports. A push application already live and accepting payments is GSEAWorld, a commerce site launched in May by Targeted Multimed ia for the General Service Employees Administration, a government employees' organization in Washington. Users enter their interests in a database and receive offers from merchants such as Holiday Inn Worldwide and Thrifty Rent-a-Car. The service, used by 20,000 GSEA members with the BackWeb client loaded on their PCs, illustrates the advantages of push technology for targeted marketing. "GSEA has a [segmented] audience of people willing to receive this kind of information," says Eric Beser, VP of engineering at Targeted Multimedia. "BackWeb has some of the best user-segmentation technology in the market." Software vendors are also embracing push technology. PowerCerv Corp. in Tampa, Fla., last week joined other sales-force automation vendors, including Vantive, Baan's Aurum Software unit, and Calico Technology, in licensing Smart Delivery from First Floor Software Inc. in Palo Alto. PowerCerv will build push into its sales apps to let companies broadcast live updates to their mobile reps. Baan is in tegrating BackWeb into its enterprise resource planning software to push manufacturing reports to shop-floor employees. It has also created a division to look at push and other Internet technologies, says Dennis Maggard, a product development manager at Baan, in Menlo Park, Calif. PeopleSoft plans to incorporate push technology into version 7.5 of its ERP software, slated for mid-1998 release. But it's the customer-focused push applications that will take center stage in the coming months. Next week, Internet auction house OnSale Inc. will unveil a push service that broadcasts auction bids in real time to a Java applet called BidWatch on users' desktops. The service is based on Castanet software from Marimba Inc. in Palo Alto. "This is really the stock market applied to bidding," says Alan Fisher, chief technology office of OnSale, in Mountain View, Calif. "We would like to engage our customers by having them participate in auctions all day long." That may be one of the pushier applications of push, b ut it's more lucrative than news updates and sports scores. With additional reporting by John Foley , Tom Stein , and Gregor Neumann/IW-Germany Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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