John Lamb's Week: IP, eBAT and being Lazy - who said this business is straightforward?

What do we have to look forward to?

Monday
This week sees Doug Loewe pushing his brogues under one of the biggest desks at Cable & Wireless. His appointment as president of Enterprise Markets, is critical to the company's efforts to get large business customers to switch to communications based on internet protocol (IP). Loewe, with a background in sales at Genuity, UUNet and CompuServe, will be number four in the organisation. He will be responsible for making Cable & Wireless' current £1bn investment in its own IP network pay for itself. Loewe is based in Barcelona, Spain. Tuesday
Replacing software-based routing and switching processes with hard-wired ones is the best way of speeding up communications. Extreme Networks will steal a march on IP switching rivals Cisco, Jupiter and Riverstone with the launch today of an IP switch in silicon that the company claims will be 25 times as fast as software driven systems. The Summit Px1 will reduce the number of servers required to run IP traffic by around one in ten, says the company. It will also speed up the rate at which transactions are completed by using so-called content-based switching: the switch will inspect message content and route more urgent traffic - such as messages concerned with financial transactions - to the fastest servers. The new Summit hardware switching technology was developed following the takeover of Webstacks by Extreme Networks. Co-browsing, a technique that allows contact centre staff to guide a customer's browser to a specific part of a website, is among the features that make up the latest version of RightNow Web eService Centre 5.0. RightNow's latest CRM product also allows customers waiting to engage in a live chat session to continue searching a website for the information they need. Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies, will be holding court at Brown's Hotel to explain to hacks how Web eService Centre learns from customer behaviour and presents appropriate data to individual customers. Wednesday
Is UK industry going bats over ebusiness? The UK Council for Electronic Business doesn't think so. The five-year-old organisation, with a membership of 30 large defence and manufacturing firms, is launching an ebusiness development assessment tool, known as e-BAT for short, to help manufacturing companies develop ebusiness initiatives. The software tool is intended to help firms establish how geared up they are for ebusiness and to aid them in developing new ebusiness programmes. A spokesman for the organisation, which is supported by the Confederation of British Industry and major trade associations, said ebusiness is particularly complex for manufacturing industry. Firms need to know about best practice in applying the technology. The Council is ramming home the bats message by holding its launch in London Zoo where the organisation is sponsoring a bat house. Attendees at the launch will be given a tour of the zoo's fruit bat colony. Friday
Also in town this week will be Lazy Software, a start-up getting a lot of attention in the techie world. They have what they call "an innovative multi-user, web-enabled database management system written in Java and based on the Associative Model of Data" which they hope will revolutionise the way databases are used, among other things. We shall see.