Boston venture capital firm Ventures North International Inc has put together and already begun to spend a $40m war chest to fund the development of Java-based vertical applications that will be rented to investment professionals, insurance agents, accountants and lawyers. The lead partner in the venture, Toronto-based ECG Technologies Inc, will build the applications using pieces of Corel Corp’s Office for Java, perhaps taking a piece of WordPerfect and using it as a chat viewer or using a charting subroutine to display stock prices. The Office-based applications are then to be embedded inside Sanga Corp’s Sanga Pages, a pure Java-based workflow framework that Corel has licensed (CI No 3,059). Both Corel and Sanga are getting $8m each for the right to use their code – Corel is ecstatic since it’s the first cash it’s received for its Java program. ECG is in talks with IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Corel Corp to set up a plan to rent Network Computers to customers for the applications it’s writing, which are scheduled to be unveiled in the first quarter and delivered in the second. The plan also calls for the applications to be sold to companies that want to use Windows NT and Windows95-based workstations. Even when used on personal computers, the ECG applications will be downloaded from a server as if they were going to an Network Computer. They could then be run on any Java-enabled browser. The whole venture depends on the Java implementation of Corel Office, which is still limited in functionality and in beta test.
