Everyone in Hollywood has one. Writers have one. Even some pets have one. So isn’t it about time your pager gets one, too?
An agent, someone-or something-acts on your behalf, freeing you for other activities. That concept has been brought to the distributed computing world with Java-based technology, which has the potential to bring to paging what it needs to survive in a two-way paradigm-meaningful content.
Two-way paging networks are the wave of the future. Analysts have said for some time that if two-way interactive paging is ever to become a ubiquitous communications tool, it will have to deliver quality information, not just two-way “chatting.”
Enter Java agents, such as the Voyager platform created by Dallas-based ObjectSpace Inc. These independent, autonomous bits of code can provide the multiplatform connectivity needed to evolve paging from the side street of the information highway to a meaningful intersection.
Today, agents don’t exist on paging devices, but efforts are under way to move in that direction.
Larry Swasey, an analyst at Allied Business Intelligence, said the benefit of agent technology is that it allows for cross-platform communication. Once achieved, it brings more value-added content to two-way networks.
“The whole key to information is being able to move it freely and seamlessly from one place to another without confinement … and that’s what all this is all about,” he said. “We have the technology, now we must define what content is important.”
Voyager is an agent-enhanced distributed computing platform for Java. An agent is a piece of Java code that can move from one platform to another, with permission to gather the information it has been programmed to seek and return it to the user. The benefit is that it works on its own. The user need not direct its actions, so the user’s device does not connect to the different platforms.
“An active agent sits there in the server and acts like you,” said David Norris, president and chief executive officer of ObjectSpace. “You can configure it as extensively as you want. It acts on your behalf. It doesn’t just give you information, it actually does things for you.”
An agent can move from a paging server, to a corporate intranet server, to a Web site server and collect information and give commands at each.
Let’s look at this from the paging perspective. A paging subscriber wants his pager to be his mobile connection to his corporate intranet. With the Voyager platform, he can have an agent sit in his corporate intranet server, programmed to look for important e-mail. When that user receives an urgent e-mail, the agent can take that message, move to the paging server, and send that e-mail to the pager.
With a two-way paging system, the user also can respond to the agent, which then carries out the user’s requests.
“The advantage of the two-way pager is that you can actually respond,” Norris said. “The two-way pager will add a whole new level of value.”
Let’s suppose the e-mail message was from a client requesting a copy of a certain invoice. The user can, from his pager, tell the agent to move back to the corporate intranet, find the requested invoice and send a copy to whomever requested it.
“At this point,” Norris said, “we are more focused on intranets and internal knowledge.” But with the proper access agreements, agents also can reside on other companies’ servers or at certain Internet sites. Suppose ObjectSpace were to come to an arrangement with a travel agency. The agent can reside on that agency’s server and page the user whenever tickets go on sale for a certain flight on a specific day and in a predetermined price range. The agent then can page the user and ask whether it should buy that ticket. Going further, the agent can page the user if that flight’s gate has changed, or if it has been delayed or canceled.
Agents can do this with stock information, paging the user when a stock hits a certain price and then can buy or sell the stock at the user’s request. The applications are almost endless.
Agents also can talk with other agents. Suppose you work in a large corporation and you need the advice of someone with a specific skill, or you need a fourth for golf and want to find someone who can play. Rather than going through the company roster and reading various bios, you can instruct your agent to talk to the agents of other employees, access their user profile, find the appropriate person, and e-mail/page him.
An important benefit is the agent itself takes up very little bandwidth. It is much quicker for the agent to travel across servers and request/receive information and return it than it is to establish a transmission link between the pager and the other server.
“It increases the appeal of the pager,” Swasey said. With agent technology, “you can bring content across platforms … two-way can become an applicable tool in a businessman’s life.”
Perhaps one reason the company today is focusing on internal knowledge is that many of the possible applications require a set of automated processes, such as buying airline tickets and stocks. The required agreements to access other servers and the programming to allow for such automated responses take time and are somewhat difficult to set up, so it is important for paging providers to determine which applications will be most popular.
According to Norris, the Voyager platform was designed specifically for the wireless marketplace. Norris said he has received a significant amount of interest from the wireless community, but cannot divulge the licensing agreements until those companies come out with products using Voyager.
One collaboration he was free to discuss was that with PageMart Wireless Inc. ObjectSpace played a vital role in helping the paging carrier create its Enhanced Services Platform. PageMart built the object-oriented technology platform “so we could be well prepared to respond quickly to market needs and do quick and rapid interfaces with other types of systems and computer networks,” said Vick Cox, vice president of Personal Communications Services Development at PageMart.
The platform connects the paging server to other platforms and networks. Those other networks may have the services and applications customers want, so the platform exists to bring those applications to the pager, instead of requiring the application to be rewritten for the paging network.
Currently, PageMart’s users experience the platform in their pager’s user interface.
At this time, PageMart’s Advanced Cross Media Information Server, or AXIS, does not support ObjectSpace’s Voyager mobile agent, but according to Cox, it will. “We’re being very conservative in our services rollout,” Cox said. The house is still being built before the agent moves in, so to speak.
In time, though, “the platform will act as the interface between the agent and the pager,” Cox said. The idea is to allow the agent access to the platform.
Today, no paging devices are capable of receiving agents directly. So this platform will be the closest an agent can get to the pager until such a time when pagers themselves can host agents.
