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Push Technology Learns Not to Shove

BackWeb's network-friendly tools may revive a controversial approach.

By Michael Vizard, Infoworld   

Push technology moved from being heralded to being vilified in less than a year as information technology managers resisted product offerings that brought the network to its knees. Since then most of the companies in this space have sought to reinvent themselves, save one. BackWeb Technologies went back to basics to create a network-friendly set of push technologies that company President and Chief Executive Officer Eli Barkat calls "Polite Push." In an interview with InfoWorld, Barkat talks about the future of push technology in the age of electronic business.

Q: What's driving push today as a tool for e-business?

A: There's something wrong with the concept of portals today, because everybody builds portals.

What you want to do is go into one portal that is your portal. If the people you work with have a proactive portal, which is push-enabled, then all you have to do is subscribe, based on your profile, to the things that are most interesting to you. Once you subscribe to multiple sites, everything gets pushed into an [information] center, which is the one place to go to look at the most critical information that's relevant to you.

Q: How does that work?

A: It basically provides priorities to different channels. You could define life cycles; you could define what  you allow to be more intrusive than others.

Q: Can you define the Polite Push concept and explain how it will revive this technology?

A: When push scaled to a million users, it killed the networks. So we came up with the concept of Polite Push that does three simple things. First, we only push information when the network is idle. If you think about it, most of the time you're using a network, you're thinking about what you want to download [yourself, and] you're thinking about what you want [to have] downloaded. We sense that time, and we use it. We're also interruptible, so we pick up from where we left off. We also deliver only changes to a package that was delivered before.

Q: What will be the relationship between push technology and wireless devices?

A: We've told everyone that one of the biggest efforts for us this year is wireless.  [Polite] Push is really the way to get people to use their browsers and their cell phones.

If you have a lead, you call someone. If you don't find [that person], you call someone else. If you don't find [that person], and you don't call someone else again, you don't leave that call until you find somebody that acts on that information. So we're connecting it to wireless. The workflow will include finding you on your PC, and then if you're not there, finding you on your wireless device. And if you're not there, then find you on your PDA.

The whole idea is to do this without leaving any tracks. Because what you don't want, when escalation is over, is to have 50 people finding that information on 50 different devices when it's not important anymore.

For more IT analysis and commentary on emerging technologies, visit InfoWorld.com. Story copyright © 2011 InfoWorld Media Group. All rights reserved.