What more is there to say? -- RK
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April 10, 1996 6:00 PM ET
DEC to step up AltaVista marketing
By _John M. Dodge_
Digital Equipment Corp., hoping to leverage the brand awareness of its
popular Internet search engine, is about to plaster the name AltaVista on a
slew of existing products as well as ones developed around the technology.
"AltaVista is our Java," said Ilene Lang, vice president of DEC's Internet
Software Business Unit, which was formerly called the Connectivity Software
Business Unit until being renamed last week. "We could change [the unit's
name] again. We're making decisions very fast."
Going into beta test in the next two months are Personal, Team, and
Enterprise editions of the AltaVista search engine. These products will search
for Hypertext Markup Language documents within the bounds of an intranet,
private corporate network, teams of workers, and even personal hard disks.
Pricing has not been set, but the Enterprise version will run on 64-bit
Digital Unix, Team will run on Windows NT, and Personal will run on Windows.
"We will extend these to other data types [in the future]," Lang added.
Other products, mostly released within the past six months, to carry the
AltaVista brand name are an X.500 directory, a program called LAN Browser,
E-mail, a workgroup product known as Forum, several firewalls, a light systems
management product formerly known as AssetWorks, and Team and Enterprise
versions of a tunneling product.
DEC, Lang added, plans to offer suites of these products. The suites are
currently code-named Intranet Solutions, for full-blown intranets; Cyberworker
Solution, for connecting branch offices and remote workers; and Village
Solution, for Internet service providers to resell to customers.
All the products from the Internet Business Software Unit could also be
resold through the DEC, MCI Communications Corp., and Microsoft Corp.
partnership announced Tuesday to collaborate on building end-to-end intranets.