We've delivered the first act of our vision of OnSite Computing: doing business wherever you are. Now we’ll ‘eXtend’ it, enabling you to do business with whatever you want to use.
We're seeing the merger of the telephone, TV, and computer, through the "glue" of the Internet. We’ll deliver "zero-footprint software" from servers, requiring no footprint on a PC, so you won't need to carry your own computer. You’ll log in through a secure Tunnel from any public or private "Internet appliance," and the server will deliver your favorite links, fonts, and other preferences, along with any application you want to use.

OnSite Computing, Act I
Doing Business Wherever You Are

OnSite Computing - Act II
Doing Business With Whatever You Want
Market Trends
Foreseeable Technological Direction
Foreseeable Consequences
Conclusion
Altavista Will Deliver This Vision
How Will It Change Your Life?

Our Business Panorama

Doing Business Wherever You Are
We believe the real benefit of the Internet is its universal presence: for the first time ever, information is location-independent.

OnSite Computing is the translation of this true Internet benefit of being able to do business wherever you are. It has three dimensions:

For the End User:
Freedom of location - information and access to people no longer depend on where you are.

From the end user standpoint, OnSite Computing means a new freedom in managing work time. Probably the most important one, as real revolutions always start and are built for end-users. Because information is no longer dependent on where you are, OnSite Computing offers the new freedom of doing business where you want to be, not where you have to be.

An example of this huge benefit might be, if you’re living close to a big city where traffic is an issue, to be able send and receive mail and other work before commuting. Instead of being stuck in traffic jams, then arrive at your office to do your mail, you’ll appreciate being able to do this at home, then take your car after the rush hours! Because you don’t have to be somewhere else to do your work, you can do it right where business requires you to be: OnSite.

For the Corporation:
Information infrastructure granularity at the level of the individual - information environments treat the individual PC the same way as a facility.

From the corporate standpoint, OnSite Computing means business responsiveness. Facilities, providers, subsidiaries, and customers are no longer the only ones to be connected - with our Tunnel products, individuals get the same consideration. Instead of grouping every employee inside the same facility, corporations can now spread out their employees in distributed home offices. The information infrastructure goes down to a new level of detail: Individuals.

For Software:
Seamless integration from WWW to PC - the same user interface, and total respect for open standards (POP3, IMAP4, LDAP, etc.)

From the software standpoint, OnSite Computing means open standards and zero training. By ‘eXtending’ our software from our technology showcases on the World Wide Web (AltaVista Search public service, ForumForum, and ABCD - the AltaVista Business Card Directory,) to your PC, users already know how to use our software, and our software is usable from any Internet-connected machine. In the example of Search, we estimate our installed base at 25 million. All our users already know how to use our Search "Private eXtension" products.

Our Product Portfolio
Our business recipe always mixes three ingredients: Information, People, & Security. Developing software to unleash the benefits of OnSite Computing drove AltaVista to provide all the ingredients to Do Business Wherever You Are. In reality, business is always about Information between People, exchanged with a degree of Security.

AltaVista Search finds non-structured information; and our AltaVista Search Private eXtension products have exactly the same interface as our popular Web site.
AltaVista Directory manages structured information, like employee White pages, for example.

AltaVista Forum helps users to share documents, using the Web as an Office Library.
AltaVista Mail Server exchanges information between people using e-mail.

AltaVista Firewall protects and AltaVista Tunnel gives controlled access to your intranet.

Doing Business… With Whatever You Want !
In Summer ‘96, we announced the first act of our vision: OnSite Computing. We’ve delivered this first part of the vision: Doing Business Wherever You Are.

This capability is now a fact. But the Internet is evolving - very quickly. It’s important to understand the future before it happens. That’s why we’d like to share with you our vision of the future, a soon-to-happen future.

OnSite Computing Act II: eXtending ‘Doing Business Wherever You Are’ to Doing Business With Whatever hardware and software you Want to use.

Market Trends
First of all, let’s understand what the trends are in our technological world. We see three things happening simultaneously:

The Internet is becoming truly ubiquitous, with true and efficient access from everywhere
The ISP market is getting very mature. In 1996, with more than 5000 ISPs in the U.S., a small number of them truly handled most of the overall connections. The big get bigger, the small smaller. Services know they must become reliable - remember what happened to America Online in December? Sprynet (Compuserve) has become more scalable after their e-mail shortage in February.

In the meanwhile, the European and Asian markets are exploding: More than 15% of the Web is not written in English, and while 55% of the queries to AltaVista Search are coming from the US, 25% are from Europe.

Internet appliances become a reality
The Internet can now be accessed from something else than a computer. WebTV is a very hot product at retail and sold at all TV stores; some printers (Hewlett Packard) include an HTTP server, to get information about ink, paper, etc., from everywhere. Other examples include Web home control systems and Network Computers.

Technology enables more multimedia/multicasting on the Web
Software technology is driving these new evolutions of Web-based information. RealVR (demonstrated on AltaVista MarketSpace VR) enables streamed Virtual Reality. RealAudio and soon RealVideo provide radio- and video-like capabilities. Pointcast, ActiveDesktop on Internet Explorer 4.0 and Constellation receive information on your browser as you’re used to receiving radio stations.

Foreseeable Technological Direction:
The Internet is merging telephone, TV, and computers through the "Glue" of the Internet. The signs?

With network computers and new PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, or "palmtop" computers), your cellular telephone is getting more computing power, a keyboard and a small display; with WebTV™ or equivalent, your TV is getting a keyboard for less than $300.

Finally, multimedia is becoming more important, from the marketing standpoint, than the speed of your computer. If you remember, for the first time in almost 10 years, Intel was promoting for its end-of-year sales its MMX technology instead of a faster clock speed. The future is clearly visible.

Foreseeable Consequences
Multi-computer access will be required
It’s evident that people will access the Internet from more than one point. If you have WebTV in your living room and a computer in your room, you access the Web from at least two points. This is important for the relationships you have with your computer today.

Today, a computer is like a toothbrush: you don’t share it. If there is multiple access to the Web from multiple points, it means those points will be shared. User-to-computer relationships will look like the relationships you have with your car today: you like it, you depend on it, it’s expensive, but you can loan it to someone - and, if it doesn’t come back in one piece, you can rent one.

Internet access will be offered in public sites
Today, you can rent a car and a telephone at an Avis booth. ‘Tomorrow,’ you’ll be able to rent a computer with Internet access with your car. The businessperson’s array of tools evolves.

Today, you can already use public computers in airports like San Francisco, London’s Heathrow, and Amsterdam. Very soon, your hotel will use WebTV or any Internet TV channel as differentiation, the same way they used HBO in the 80s.

Conclusions
New Computer-user relationships
A personal, customized, very intimate computer won’t be required anymore to get the benefit of a new kind of computing, OnSite Computing - doing business with whatever tools you want to use.

New software direction
For us, an Internet software provider, it means a requirement to develop new kinds of software. We can’t depend on the client. And the client will only be used for local calculation or computation.

The server software will have to manage not only the data but also all the user profiles. This is new.

You might think it’s the return of the mainframe and the dumb terminal; but it’s not. End users are accustomed to a personal environment, so the client won’t be dumb, it will be teachable! We’re moving from ‘Client-Server’ to ‘Served-Client Server’ - where the server also serves up the client for you.

AltaVista will deliver this vision!
Now let’s focus in on some of the specifics.

Zero-footprint software
You won’t need a lot of chunky applications cluttering up your available storage any more. We’ll deliver software with no local client required.

The client will be "transported," or "served". The technical challenge will be to serve a Tunnel Client on any kind of Internet appliance or computer, like WebTV and others. You’ll log on the Net, pick a URL, AltaVista will "serve" a Tunnel client, and you’ll identify yourself, either manually or more probably with a solid key, your watch, credit card, or whatever.

You will be able to get your e-mail with a "Served e-mail client." No e-mail client will be required on the local machine, which means you won’t have any setup or installation. We have this technology in our labs today.

Total User Knowledge Search and Retrieval - both a shared and totally private knowledge repository
We’ll extend our famous Search-and-Retrieval technology to everything. To our present indexing of documents, we’ll add sound, graphics, video, and even visual memory to our index technology. If you saw something on the Web three days ago… we’ll find it. We are working on all these technologies in our labs today.

Total User Profile Management
We’ll manage your entire user profile. You’ll use directories not only for others but also for yourself - not only for authentication, but also all your preferences - fonts, backgrounds, sounds, bookmarks, etc. - will be restored after connection. You’ll be right at home wherever you are! We are working on all this technology in our labs today.

Total Security
Finally we’ll continue to improve our complete security solution for an ultimate protection and access control.

We have these technologies today.

How will it change your life?
You won’t have to carry any computer with you - as we’ve shown, your computing power will be available to you not only from wherever you are, but through whatever interface devices are handy. Imagine this scenario:

From your hotel room or using any computer wherever you are, you log on to the Internet.

You identify yourself (thru a credit card, a special watch, your voice, fingerprints on the keyboard…) to start your AltaVista Tunnel connection.

Immediately your "Personal environment" is restored. You’ll retrieve your favorites colors, fonts, background, links...

You read and reply to your AltaVista Mail (thru WebTV!)

You create/modify a document directly into AltaVista Forum (your "Office Library").

You gather up-to-date information about your next appointment thru ABCD, and add the person into your AltaVista Directory, where you get all the history of previous visits and deals made by colleagues and predecessors.

You search for all the latest news on your company’s products in your intranet and workgroup, and automatically get all competitive information from competitor’s Web site. All in one "submit" with AltaVista Search.

Stay tuned, as AltaVista delivers the future
to your screen.

This business panorama will help you understand the components of our business model. Discover how we create and drive our business - originating from our state of the art public services, and extending the reach of our technology worldwide, to your business, and into the privacy of your intranet.

The story begins with our public services. We want to provide the Internet community with state of the art public services, to make it a better place to do business. AltaVista Search already serves over 21 million users a day with the quickest and most complete search engine on the Internet, helping them find the information they need.

The AltaVista ForumForum serves the same community with over 1,000 floors of virtual office space, where people can meet, share knowledge, exchange ideas, and collaborate. Our Forum technology is bringing businesses, associations, and families together.

More of these valuable, free public services will appear soon. So stay tuned...

AltaVista Search Public Services

• The largest Web index: 30 million pages, 275,600 servers, 14,000 news groups
• Over 21 million queries per day
• The fastest Search engine on the Internet

• Over a 1,000 floors of business and personal Forums
• Discussion groups, document sharing
• Global access

Because the Internet is global, we want to bring our public services geographically closer to you. That’s what the AltaVista WorldWide Network "eXtension" does, mirroring our technologies in every geographical area through associations with local Internet business visionaries.

And it’s already begun: you can now find localized AltaVista Search sites in Europe and Australia, and soon, all over the planet.

Our WW Network sites include:

• Localized contents and user interface
• Geographic selected search
• Local servers

After showcasing our technologies and giving them worldwide coverage, the next logical step is to help you extend this service to your business. Like a "virtual franchise" system, Business eXtensions allows Internet entrepreneurs to build their own business around our technologies. Yahoo and C/Net, two cutting edge Internet businesses, already use these Business eXtensions to add real value to their site. Be one of the winners - be a part of the AltaVista success story.

The AltaVista Business eXtension:

• Build your business around AltaVista Public Services
• Advertise around AltaVista Search results
• No software/hardware investment

The final chapter of this story is to help you extend these winning technologies and services to the privacy of your intranet, bringing you the competitive advantage of OnSite Computing.

Through a comprehensive line of Internet software, we will help you build a complete intranet solution, bringing your business the competitive edge!

Manage the three dimensions of your business the most effectively with AltaVista products :