Kenamea targets Web-based messaging

• By Brian Robinson
• Dec 09, 2001

When it was first emerging, the World Wide Web provided users with a much-needed ability to portray a wide range of content on the computer screen. It was a groundbreaking concept, but if the Internet is to evolve, so too must the Web.

Although the Web is still great for delivering content, it is lousy for handling applications. If it is to be the platform for deploying e-business, the NGI needs reliable, secure and event-driven communications, not the best-effort system that rules today.

That's the basis for the solution that San Francisco-based Kenamea Inc. (www.kenamea.com) offers.

"The NGI is all about access to function, rather than information," said John Blair, president, chief executive officer and co-founder of Kenamea. "For the government, for example, that means giving their suppliers and the general populace access to government functions, and that's a major difference in kind. Anyone who has tried to build a Web application around today's technology has found it painful to use and very expensive to develop and deploy."

Kenamea's Application Network is a software application layer that hooks into any network protocol, using store-and-forward messaging — a system that has been in use for some time on intranets — as the basis for communi.cations via the Internet.

In store-and-forward messaging, a message broker receives messages from senders and delivers them to recipients if and when possible. This scheme is more reliable than user-to-user messaging, because if delivery fails the first time, the message can be resent. Providing comparable reliability in standard networks is much harder.

"As mobile technology and other elements of the NGI evolve, that becomes even more important, because wireless is much less reliable and secure than other media," Blair said.

After two years in development, Kenamea's Application Network has been commercially available for three months. The company will use the CommerceNet grant to demonstrate to industry how its solution will help deliver distributed applications to users via the NGI.