Editorial Background

Purpose
This document has been created to provide select analysts and members of the press with supplementary information about ExtranetWorks Corporation, its products, and underlying technologies. It should be used primarily to understand the types of problems that can be solved using ExtranetWorks products and how these products relate to other products and technology.

This document is not self-contained. It is meant to be used in conjunction with other company, product, and technology information published by ExtranetWorks including product brochures and architecture white papers for ExtranetWorks’s JAVA Application Broker (JAB) and Scalable Session Manager (SSM).

Feature Article by ExtranetWorks CEO, Greg Gubrud Appears In Transponder

Portland, Oregon | August 15, 1998 | Satellite industry magazine, Transponder included an article by ExtranetWorks CEO, Gregory Gubrud. Gubrud gives delivers his view on how to make large scale, enterprise wide system implementations work. See the August 1998 edition.

ExtranetWorks CEO, Gubrud Hits The Mark With Speech To Devcon Participants.

Portland, Oregon | September 29, 1998 | Extranetworks CEO Gegory Gubrud delivered a successful presentation to this year's DEVCON developers conference attendees. Gubrud presented his experience in working with Fortune 500 size companies and how to work toward successful projects. Click to see DEVCON agenda.

ExtranetWorks Corporation
ExtranetWorks Corporation is a privately owned software and services company. ExtranetWorks was founded from ONTOP Systems in 1998 and is based in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Product Focus and Market
ExtranetWorks develops and markets software products for extranetwork business solutions—those solutions that extend the reaches of organizations to workers, offices and trading partners throughout the world, using the Internet. Its software also facilitates application integration across heterogeneous database and network environments. ExtranetWorks’s solutions include proprietary and partner development tools and consulting and development services.

ExtranetWorks’s software is used in implementing transactional applications across the Internet for remote offices and customers, and mobile workers through Internet transaction processing (ITP), and electronic commerce (EC).

Value Proposition
Just as visual development tools (Power Builder, Visual Basic, etc.) have delivered orders of magnitude improvement in a developer’s ability to implement GUI applications, so ExtranetWorks’s products have dramatically reduced the complexity, risk, implementation time, and cost associated with remote transactional processing and application integration projects.

ExtranetWorks accomplishes this by delivering its products as completely self-contained applications that mirror the business rules of the organization, both in scope and functionality. ExtranetWorks hides the complexity of distributed transactional processing across the Internet, as well as details of how application code, logic, and data are distributed between the user and the legacy back end.

Applications are implemented by a "Lego block-like" application construction process that looks at development according to business rules instead of data-centric record relationships. By adding ExtranetWorks’s products to existing legacy systems and providing application integration capabilities, ExtranetWorks solutions can quickly and cost effectively extend the computing enterprise around the world.

Value found in ExtranetWorks’s products is derived from its pioneering work in simplifying how applications, data, logic and graphical presentation are delivered from legacy systems to the user across the Internet. ExtranetWorks has both pioneered the development of ERAD (Enterprise Rapid Application Development) as well as validated ERAD’s capabilities through early successful projects.

Centralized SFA/Technology Enabled Selling (TES)
In its simplest configuration, ExtranetWorks software extends existing LAN-based client/server systems for mobile and remote applications. In this configuration ExtranetWorks adds the ability to define and manage the flow of transactions between enterprise databases and client applications hosted on mobile and remote computers.

This configuration is typically used in implementing a simple, centralized sales force automation (SFA) system and it is usually the first step an organization takes towards TES.

Scalability
As an organization adds more mobile and remote users, ExtranetWorks Scalable Session Manager (SSM) provides multiple-server session distribution—channeling user sessions and transactions to least-active servers. In this configuration the increased transaction load is balanced across a cluster of ExtranetWorks servers.

Manageability
Solutions can include system administration consoles that allow either LAN or WAN based connectivity to data on the ExtranetWorks servers.

Security
Applications are secured by numerous security techniques, including authentication, encryption, and compression of data.

Distributed SFA
To further extend this system, ExtranetWorks multi-tier TP capabilities become important. Additional ExtranetWorks servers are added at regional offices. This configuration is usually enough to satisfy the heavy transactional requirements of SFA applications that support a national sales force.

Global SFA
In very large organizations, additional ExtranetWorks servers can be added to local offices. Typically this is only required for SFA applications designed to support a worldwide sales organization.

Electronic Commerce/Supply Chain Management (SCM)
ExtranetWorks Scalable Session Manager capabilities are easily applied to EC. One such example is Supply Chain Management (SCM). In this type of application, transactions that represent inventory replenishment orders from customers or confirmations and billing from vendors can be easily exchanged between ExtranetWorks clients and servers installed at participating organizations.

Integrated SCM and SFA
Integration of an organization’s SCM and SFA functions into a single ExtranetWorks system is easily accomplished using the flexible Java Application Broker architecture. This allows organizations to become even more efficient.

Relationship To Other Technologies
ExtranetWorks’s solutions are robust, real-time applications that allow workers to instantaneously interact with corporate data from remote locations. Several technologies have been offered to handle remote information processing, but most are dated because Internet access has come so far in recent years, including (1) wide spread availability, (2) inexpensive connections, (3) low infrastructure investment, (4) adoption of secure transaction standards, (4) greater communication bandwidth, (5) high reliability.

Groupware
Groupware is a term made popular by Lotus Notes. In most cases it refers to the a class of products that facilitate better coordination of human activity through the sharing of documents. Extended transaction processing still facilitates similar coordination of business activity through the sharing of work. In particular, just as groupware focuses on documents, so extended transaction processing is concerned with the flow of transactions and the sharing of database information in a distributed environment.

Java
Java’s main benefit is that it provides a platform-independent execution environment for applications written in this language. ExtranetWorks uses Java to encapsulate application code that is dispensed to users through the Java Application Broker (JAB).

Messaging Software
Message software is used utilized by ExtranetWorks as needed, particularly in applications that do note require human intervention or interaction to data.

Object Request Brokers (ORBS)
ORBS are becoming increasingly popular in industry literature as a way to integrate applications. ExtranetWorks can utilize ORBS, such as CORBA and DCOM as needed. ORBs can often be used to facilitate tighter integration between applications and infrastructure resources used in a particular project. Furthermore, we can enable transactional ORB proxies to be established so that occasionally connected ORB-based applications can be easily implemented. This strategy can be used in an automated workflow environment.

Replication
Replication is a capability sometimes required in an automated integration system. Selectively replicating the data required by a distributed transaction allows that transaction to continue, even when the site at which the transaction is executed is disconnected from the data source. In addition to replication, ExtranetWorks likes to look at integrating support for process flow and build systems to support long running transactions.

ExtranetWorks extended transaction processing is "process-centric" – transactions implement business logic. Replication is always "data-centric." It occurs when data changes, independent of business processes and independent of whether it makes sense (within the context of a business process) to propagate database changes at any particular instance.

Workflow
ExtranetWorks systems integrate the workflow of business process into the extended transactions that are used to implement these processes. Defining a business transaction in an ExtranetWorks application is done by answering these four questions:

• Which data is used in the transaction?
• When is the transaction triggered?
• Who are the participants in the transaction?
• What happens when the transaction executes?

Items (2) and (3) specify the "workflow" element within the transaction.

World Wide Web
Browsers have emerged as a popular interface for Internet applications. Beyond support for forms-based GUI front-ends (implemented in Clarion, Visual Basic, Power Builder, etc.), ExtranetWorks solutions support Web browsers as an alternative way to interface with transactional applications. Browser users can now use Web applications to originate their application data and business logic.

The result is low maintenance and training costs, incrementally developed applications that automate selected business processes rather than huge projects that require long time periods to deployment and high development costs. Applications are reliable, yet low-cost because they can run on existing client platforms, and use NT servers that integrate to high-end, legacy systems through ExtranetWorks Java Application Broker technology.

© Copyright 1998, ExtranetWorks Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

9700 SW Capitol Hwy., Suite 100 Portland, Oregon U.S.A. Phone: (503) 977-0200 Web: www.extranetworks.com