The Bloor Perspective: Back-up fracas, Palm and Sony, and traffic measurement

Just two days after making inaccurate claims for its own ARCserve product, Computer Associates has challenged Veritas to prove that it can substantiate its claim that it can read ARCserve tapes. Upon closer scrutiny, it would seem that both companies have allowed their desire to appear better than the opposition to cloud technical reality.

Let's start at the beginning. On 20 June, CA announced the latest release of ARCserve 2000 with the statement that 'for the first time& unparalleled' server-free backup would be available. This is despite the fact that such a product has been available elsewhere for about 12 months. Celestra was originally developed by Intelliguard - now owned by Legato. As a major competitor of CA's, one would expect Legato's products to be known to it.

Two days later, on 22 June, Veritas sent out a release that said that it could read ARCserve 6.x tapes and offer a migration path for CA customers who want to move to its Backup Exec product. It was at this point that CA laid down its challenge to Veritas to read within four hours a message from a tape that it would provide.

Eventually, Veritas agreed it could only read tapes written using standard options and would not be able to read tapes where compression or other options had been used. Again, Veritas was being somewhat economical with the truth.

PR spin aside, this episode has proved releases such as these are completely useless to businesses that are searching for the right product. CA and Veritas are not alone in this practice - these two just got caught up in a rather amusing 'foot in mouth' episode that did neither party any good.

The serious point is that both CA and Veritas have demonstrated to the world that their products are incompatible and that there is little intention to allow them to work together.

Despite the continued importance of backup and recovery software to all sizes of business, the market players - including Legato, despite its inappropriately named OpenTape format - have done nothing to allow businesses to swap vendors.

Tapes written by one product rarely can be read by another. It's about time businesses demanded that their backup and recovery suppliers got together and sorted themselves out.

*The big PDA push*

It's tempting to associate 'Palm' with a sleepy lagoon. But the Personal Digital Assistant market is anything but sleepy. Sony is diving into the pool with some characteristic touches. Whether it can do so with a name as memorable as Walkman remains to be seen.

Palm will have been delighted that heavyweight Sony launched a Palm-based product at PC Expo. Only a prototype is available, but it is an important step for Palm having others concentrate on the hardware manufacturing, while it focuses on the software platform.

Although details are scarce, it is known Sony Memory Stick portable storage cards will be supported. Sony aims to build a range of popular consumer devices rendered more attractive by their ability to inter-operate. The company will also exploit the internet to complement capabilities of the products themselves. Internet connections are likely to be even more important for the PDA than the PlayStation games console.

And with 'digital imaging' capabilities, there is obvious synergy with digital cameras and videos if Sony can capture consumers' imaginations.

While the PDA market is booming, it is likely to grow much further with the impact of wireless technology. Although WAP phones are being promoted heavily at present, the future is likely to embrace the PDA.

The phone makers have built a consortium around Symbian, the technology for which comes from Psion's PDA software. Sony, while currently launching a Palm-based PDA, has also licensed the Symbian operating system for use in 'smart' mobile phones.

Many of us reluctantly cart laptop computers around, but if most business tasks could be achieved through a pocket gadget there is no doubt which way the choice would go.

Microsoft has failed to leverage its PC dominance to achieve sales of Windows CE, now renamed PocketPC. The interesting contest is now between Palm and Symbian, with the role of WAP a subsidiary issue.

There will be a good deal of manoeuvring by the major manufacturers as they seek to find the combination that will lure consumers most effectively. Sony has a foot in both camps and a credible strategy for building a set of inter-working products that are supported by the internet. It is likely to be one of the winners.

*How many hits?*

After the discussions surrounding Lastminute.com's approach to counting visitors to its web pages, NetGenesis has published a report claiming that most website managers are struggling with methods behind statistics often quoted by online businesses.

There is a need for some form of standard measurement so accurate analysis can be carried out. NetGenesis, of course, has a vested interest here because it provides the tools and services required to measure web activity. However, its report indicates that the volume of data overwhelms managers and most of it isn't meaningful.

The statistics of most interest are counts of unique website visitors, the number of visits made and the 'stickiness' of the website. These are the figures that businesses use to attract revenue from advertisers. But so far, the results have been stunning in their inaccuracy.

Thus, when Lastminute.com comes along with figures that show a doubling of customers, it is not entirely surprising that there are sceptics. Different people have different ideas about how a customer can be defined, and how 'stickiness' (interest levels) should be measured. Whilst the technical figures are available, translating these into business metrics is a problem.

This situation makes the whole dot-com market a farce. The nature of online businesses - until recently - has been to get funding early and then go for an IPO as soon as possible to get some fast bucks that will pay for the marketing effort required to make the business pay. Once a business has gone to IPO, its future is very much in the hands of the analysts who clearly don't have a clue how much traffic is going through a dot-com. It makes for interesting forecasts.

The other interesting aspect is that most dot-coms don't know the correct figures either. This gives them the freedom to be creative with their estimates so that business appears to be growing and advertisers are more easily attracted.

There is a need for a set of standard measures to define how a website is being accessed and for measuring the levels of interest of visitors. There is also scope for the introduction of an independent arbiter of these figures so that the arguments over the accuracy of the data can cease.

** For more research, see http://www.it-director.com