Hyperwave portal launches with intro pricing deal

Hyperwave is unveiling its new Hyperwave Information Portal (HIP) to beta users now and is offering a pricing deal for those companies who purchase now for install in Q1 of 2000.

While Hyperwave realizes it is not the only player in the portal space, according to Tim Kounadis, VP of North American Marketing, currently available products “lead to a portal flatland.” Kounadis explained that a problem plaguing portals is that users often click on links only to see file not found, defeating the purpose of the tool.

Said Gary McGrath, Hyperwave general manager: “If we survey the portal market today, we find that most portals simply provide interesting interfaces to unreliable content.”

The HIP is designed to better manage these connections.

“The Hyperwave Information Portal creates time for its users by providing the tools necessary to not only aggregate information from myriad disparate sources, but more importantly, by managing the connections between information sources. This means that users are not thrashing about in myriad applications and repositories and rummaging through broken hyperlinks,” said analyst Tom Koulopolis, president of the Delphi Group.

HIP features dynamic, bi-directional link management, which verifies quality of link and hides links to unauthorized content.

The HIP is built on the Hyperwave Information Server (HIS) infrastructure, and is designed to make structured and unstructured corporate information searchable via a browser-accessible networked environment.

While in beta-test now, the product will start at $100,000 when it becomes generally available at the beginning of next year. With the announcement of the product, the company has unveiled a pricing plan through the end of this year for $39 per user (up to 2,500 users). Users purchasing this will be able to leverage the HIS and will receive the HIP when available.

An HIS user pointed to another benefit of the Hyperwave technology. By using the HIS, Allegheny Ludlum has been able publish and access information without the having to bring in a webmaster, said David Forrest, research associate with the company.

“Anybody familiar with a PC can use the system,” he said.

HIP is expected to continue this by making an individual portal easy to manage, said Hyperwave’s Kounadis