Westborough, Massachusetts-based Banyan Systems Inc’s Redwood three-year programme to win big business from business use of the Internet (CI No 2,668) is based around three of the company’s existing technologies: its StreetTalk directory service; the BeyondMail electronic mail system taken on with the acquisition of Beyond Systems Inc, and the DeMarc network management architecture. The StreetTalk elem ent of the programme – dubbed Click to Information – is designed to evolve the directory service beyond its existing boundaries, to include extended enterprise network components, and new features. Broadly speaking, Banyan is aiming to give users point-and-click access to a variety of network elements including electronic mail; network devices such as printers; applications; or to search for World Wide Web pages or Gopher sites. As part of this, Banyan is implementing a series of initiatives including StreetTalk 500, which is designed to provide X.500 compatibility through support for the X.500 DAP, DSP and LDAP protocols; Universal StreetTalk, through which Banyan hopes to increase the number of enterprise applications using StreetTalk by licensing it royalty-free to application developers; and Directory Synchronisation tools designed to enable administrators to keep track of application directories including those from Microsoft Corp, Novell Inc and Lotus Development Corp. Also under way is a Business Objects initiative, which will define new classes of objects, including printers; Object Linking & Embedding objects; terminal emulation objects; client-server databases; and user-installed applications.
Internet Business Directory
Security will be provided through the X.509 standard, says the company. Another initiative intended to take StreetTalk beyond its existing boundaries is the Internet Business Directory, which, as its name suggests, will result in a version of StreetTalk that runs over the Internet. Finally, the company also has plans for intelligent agents designed to give remote users access to information on the corporate network on an as-needed basis. The second component of Redwood is Business on Mail, which is designed to build line-of-business applications centred on store-and-forward messaging. A key element of this, says the company, is a new set of application development tools for creating electronic mail and World Wide Web forms and linking them to database systems. In this way, says Banyan, access to corporate databases can be extended to remote users via the Internet, while the high costs of deploying TCP/IP protocols and client-server databases on desktops throughout the organisation will be eliminated. The tools will be based on BeyondMail using its electronic forms, rules and agents technology, which will be extended to work with any database or electronic mail application, according to the company. Finally, Banyan is introducing the concept of Self-Managing Networks. This expands the concept of the self-healing network introduced with DeMarc, using its intelligent agent architecture – and the workflow, rules and forms technology being introduced with Business on Mail – to automate routine tasks, identify potential problems, and resolve frequently-occurring problems automatically.
