Riverbed Technologies Inc. and Spyglass Inc. said they have entered a worldwide licensing agreement under which Riverbed will incorporate Spyglass’ Prism technology with its ScoutWare mobile enterprise software.
The agreement provides a much-needed entrance into the growing mobile enterprise market for Spyglass.
“The most significant aspect of the deal is it brings Spyglass technology, specifically Prism, into the corporate enterprise market,” said Jack Armstrong, vice president of mobile data services at Spyglass. “It’s an indication of the corporate world becoming a viable market for these Internet devices from a connected sense.”
Prism is a server-based technology used by wireless carriers to optimize Internet content for wireless devices. The company’s Device Mosaic product is a microbrowser adopted by several device manufacturers. The missing piece, Armstrong said, was enterprise network customers. By bundling Prism with Riverbed’s enterprise solutions, Prism now has that link to the enterprise environment.
Riverbed’s Scout corporate client/server products optimize intranet-based data for devices such as the PalmPilot from 3Com Corp. Bundled with Prism, users will be able to access public intranet-based data as well.
“Prism adds the ability for a Pilot user to access HTML-based Internet data and connect to Riverbed client software for display,” Armstrong said.
Prism technology is designed to convert Hypertext Markup Language-based Internet data for handheld devices. It intercepts a user’s Internet request and converts the Internet-based data from HTML into a format the device can read, such as to Wireless Markup Language for Wireless Application Protocol enabled devices, as WAP technology can only transmit Internet information written in WML.
Prism also optimizes Web content based on network bandwidth and latency, content size and format and how each device prefers to represent the information. For instance, it can split a large document into several smaller linked documents the device can read in parts, due to limited memory and display screen size.
Armstrong said the growing interest of the enterprise market is a tell-tale sign of the wireless Internet industry’s impending ramp up.
