Reinforcing its companywide commitment to meld the corporate enterprise with the World Wide Web, IBM is pouring $100 million into its Thomas J. Watson Research Center this year in order to develop a wide variety of Internet- and networking-based technologies, some of which will begin trickling out this year.

This heavy investment, about 25 percent of the total budget for IBM Research, is backing up Chairman Louis Gerstner's promise to keep his company poised on the razor's edge of new technologies, specifically with conferencing and video applications, Java development, and Web-site management tools.

"We believe Java is real. We are working as closely as we can with the business units to get the best technologies into IBM products. The faster the better," said Stuart Feldman, department group manager in IBM Research's networked computing software department, in Hawthorne, N.Y.

One such product born in IBM Research was Lotus Web Cutter for Java, which is expected to be packaged with Lotus DominoAction and available for beta testing in the next few weeks, IBM officials said.

The product, based on Java Foundation Classes, allows Webmasters to access and manage a complex intranet with the help of a richly detailed site map.

Capable of managing an intranet with as many as 10,000 nodes, the upcoming product will provide administrators with information about the location of URLs, processing throughput speeds of servers, and down connections among servers.

The product is expected to compete against Microsoft's Site Server Usage Analyst, which the Redmond, Wash.-based company acquired last year from NetCarta, in Scotts Valley, Calif.

Another product, called WebCollab, is a Java-based application that allows users to display static visual data, such as slides and drawings, during teleconferences over an intranet. The product lets users in multiple locations make whiteboard presentations while they are on a telephone or an Internet phone.

Users in a teleconference can make marks on a presentation foil using the technology's Live Pointer, which tracks the motion of a user's mouse in real time.

IBM Research's labs in Beijing have also begun work on what officials called Hot Video technology, which extends the idea of hot links from text and images to full-motion video.

The technology makes it possible to embed hot links within digital formats such as .AVI, .MPG, and DAT.

Other projects being developed include BambaPhone, video-based technology that allows any PC to be part of a two-way videophone; several language compilers, including a just-in-time compiler for Java and a full reference-language compiler called Jikes that also serves as a language checker; and a lightweight browser that some sources have said is being considered for use in IBM's upcoming version of OS/2 Warp for network computers.

"[Jikes] is a very careful reference-language compiler that will compile precisely what you ask it to. This is important because there will finally be a compiler that can really judge if you have an honest and true Java program," Feldman said.

IBM Research is also at work integrating audio and video capabilities directly into a number of IBM workgroup products and technologies.

IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, located in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., can be reached at (914) 945-2704.

Source: InfoWorld