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 COLUMN
Slam Dunk Networks flatly denies charging customers e-postage THIS IS MY penultimate column. So I looked for a slam dunk. I wanted a topic I could carry high and jam down through the Net with crowd-pleasing violence.
Basketball without slam dunks would be like hockey without fights, like elections without debates, or better still like InfoWorld without me. So what better slam-dunk topic than paying postage on electronic mail? The last time I wrote about e-postage, I got death threats -- the only two in eight years of InfoWorld punditry. Wise man that he is, Robert C. Miller, CEO of Slam Dunk Networks, flatly denies charging e-postage. Instead, Slam Dunk charges pennies per kilobyte for guaranteed delivery of business-to-business transactions over the Internet, which is entirely different from e-postage, right? Miller says Slam Dunk Networks is not like the U.S. Postal Service, which does charge postage. Slam Dunk is like one of those guaranteed overnight package delivery services. Except that the overnight services deliver in a day for dollars that which Slam Dunk delivers in seconds for pennies -- down to half a cent per kilobyte in under four seconds. This is a price-performance advantage of more than a million times better. See www.slamdunknetworks.com. Miller says Slam Dunk doesn't carry short text messages from person to person. Slam Dunk carries high-value transactions in the workflow among the e-commerce applications of thousands of trading partners. Slam Dunk takes transaction bits from enterprise application software. It encrypts, copies, and wraps them in an XML envelope. It speeds them in parallel formation through Slam Dunk data stores co-located on Internet backbones around the world. Taking a slice through Internet industry structure, Slam Dunk is just above Internet transport providers and just below Crossworlds, Extricity, Oracle, Tibco, Vitria, webMethods, and others doing enterprise application integration. Slam Dunk carries transactions regardless of format, or as Miller says, "HTTP is us." In a recent announcement with VeriSign, Slam Dunk listed its competitors as VANs (value-added networks), VPNs, and EDI (electronic data interchange) networks. Of course e-mail is free, so why pay Slam Dunk? Well if you choose to pay what I'll call Slam Dunk's e-postage, you get guaranteed delivery, speed, storage, encryption, authentication, and nonrepudiation. You also get a portal through which to order additional services, such as insurance against damages from repudiated transactions. Slam Dunk Networks has raised $75 million in four rounds since its founding in December 1998. It is now operating in 20 cities including Fremont, Calif., Hong Kong, London, New York, and Singapore. Today, Slam Dunk can carry a million 12KB transactions per day. It has growing revenue and is expanding. It will break even in 2002, Miller says -- above 40GB per day. Slam Dunk has attracted cash from venture capitalists, which these days is no great accomplishment, but also from -- analyze this -- Adobe, American Express, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, Texas Instruments, Tibco, VeriSign, and webMethods. Miller says Slam Dunk will add various classes of service. For example, engineering drawings are in the gigabytes, but don't need subminute delivery. Another example, to play with fire, is delivering purchased MP3 files from record companies, or directly from musicians. Now at the risk of death threats, I say there is nothing to stop trading partners from connecting their e-mail client software to the Slam Dunk Network. Some people might like to choose grades of e-mail service higher than can be paid for with flat-rate access or banner ads. Maybe then Miller will admit to charging e-postage. Next week, the Final Episode of From the Ether. Bob Metcalfe 's current book, now in its third paperback printing from IDG Books, is Internet Collapses and Other InfoWorld Punditry. Buy a copy while they last. His next book is likely to be a slam dunk -- he's calling it Harry Potter Five.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business NewsE-CommerceEnterprise ApplicationsMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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