Exponentially Bigger Markets: How to Make Money with ™ By Win Quigley and Mike Young

Literally thousands of businesses run on BASIS because thousands of resellers have created valuable applications and sold them to small and mid-sized businesses all over the world. Without the resellers, there would be no BASIS International Ltd.

There is plenty of new business to be won with these well-crafted BBx®-based applications. Businesses will run on BBxfor years to come. However, our new product offering, BBj™, will help resellers do new things that will significantly expand the kinds of markets into which they can sell.

BBj programmers will be able to sell to larger, more complex enterprises, which is critical because enterprises are becoming larger and more complex.

Beyond 1999
As we see it, the future of business enterprise computing is Web- and network-based data and sales management. According to Business Week, Yahoo collects 400 gigabytes of data per day over the Internet. In the United States, 100 million people are connected to the Internet. The Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas estimates the Internet economy in the United States is worth $301 billion. (The automobile industry is worth $350 billion.) Forrester, a market research company, estimates business-to-business electronic commerce will total $1.3 trillion in 2003.

In addition to the boom in electronic business transactions, there will be a boom in data warehousing and mining: the use of computing to extract valuable business information from the morass of data all businesses have accumulated for years. The Department of Commerce reports a quarter of all manufacturers surveyed in 35 countries report they are currently mining their data for business and marketing insights.

Businesses are creating much more complicated computing environments. For example, one BASIS customer provides nursing home care throughout the United States. Many of its field operations collect billing, patient, insurance and other information into BBx MKEYED files. When the information has to be compiled at corporate headquarters, all of the BBx files have to be translated and stored in an Oracle database, a process that currently can take hours. But BBj will make this process almost transparent.

The Advantages of BBx But Much Better
BBx has been, and will continue to be, a great tool with which to create business enterprise software. BBj will have all of the advantages of BBx, plus it will meet the needs of larger, networked enterprises.

BBj will be Web-friendly. BBj can be used to create applets and other components that can be downloaded or executed in a browser. Developers will be able to create Web-based applications and convert existing BBx applications to become Web-enabled. Order entry software created for stand-alone terminals can become the portal into a Web-based sales package. Processes that take place in another building or another country can become part of a BBj application running on a desktop, using BBj objects and Internet capabilities.

New BASIS file systems and query capabilities will allow the developer to work with much larger and much more complicated file structures. File access will be faster. File sizes will be virtually unlimited. Complicated queries can be written with standard programming tools. The results can be manipulated with legacy applications converted to BBj.

Moreover, BBj will make access to large databases managed by Oracle and other products much more transparent. The nursing home care company will be able to create MKEYED files in BBj and transport them over the net to a BBj application at corporate headquarters. The corporate BBj application will use our new file management tools to put the data into the Oracle database transparently.

Because BBj is based on Java™, BBj applications will add value to even very complex enterprises with a wide range of hardware and software products. These applications will run wherever there is an appropriate Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Thus, the BBj developer no longer cares if the platform the enterprise uses is from Sun, IBM, HP, Dell, Compaq or anyone else. The operating system could be Linux, UNIX or Microsoft Windows NT.

Even better, the BBj application doesn’t stop adding value when the enterprise needs software from another company. Software written in Java and compiled in a JVM becomes an object any other application can potentially use. BBj applications add value to other Java-based applications; BBj applications can incorporate the value of other applications.

BASIS has been helping resellers create bet-the-business software for more than a decade. With BBj, more businesses than ever can bet on you.

Win Quigley brings more than 15 years of experience wedding high technology products to markets as BASIS’ Product Marketing Manager. Prior to joining BASIS in 1999, Win was Vice President for Business Development at Technology Commercialization Inc., where he screened emerging technologies for development in domestic and international markets. Before that, as a Product Manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, he headed the concept-to-market-release development of two high-technology product lines. Win holds an M.B.A. in financial management from the University of New Mexico.

Mike Young joined BASIS in 1998 and is a Sales Account Executive. Mike has over 10 years of experience in sales, five of which are in technology sales and retail management. In the retail environment, he managed the setup, product selection and business management of computer and telecommunications technology centers focused on small- to mid-sized businesses, and has also sold large-scale business solutions in paging and cellular communications.