Whistle Communications Inc. wants its InterJet to be to small business Net access and Intranet creation what the laser printer was to desktop publishing: a simple peripheral that drives a market. Experts say it could succeed just by using reliable, trailing-edge technology implemented with remarkable ease of use.

A box with an uncanny resemblance to Scott Adams' comic strip character Dogbert (it was built by Apple Computer Inc. refugees who clearly put "cute" in the design specs), the InterJet is a combination Network Computer, or NC, and router, with a Web and mail server thrown in.

"I've never believed that anything is really 'plug and play,' but this comes pretty close to it," says Steve Wang, vice president of operations for Axis Systems LLC, which makes special computers for air traffic controllers.

Aimed at small businesses with one or just a few dial-up connections, plugging it into a local area network, or LAN, connects every computer on the network to the Internet. Every machine's Internet connection is handled remotely through software administered by one's Internet service provider, or ISP.

Axis uses the Intranet established by the InterJet for scheduling, tracking project status, internal communication and file sharing.

"Before, we had to print out schedules on paper and hand them to people," Wang says.

Thanks to its Intranet, twice-weekly, two-hour planning and project updating meetings have been cut to 30 minutes once a week for the 15-person Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

Axis also uses the InterJet to update the contents of its public Web site daily.

"It's got a good market; it's simple to use and devised for people to get on the Net quickly," says Jerry Michalski, managing editor of industry newsletter Release 1.0 (www.edventure.com). "It's effective and at the right price [under $2,000]. It's a big opportunity that a lot of people have not seen very clearly."

For the moment, Whistle in Foster City, Calif., appears to have an open field. Though several software solutions are targeted at the below- the-router business market, no analyst contacted could list any similar hardware- software Internet appliance aimed at the small-business market.

"It's surprising that no one has done this before," says Zona Research Inc. analyst Harry Fenik. "An appliance that does all the hard stuff of connecting is really amazing. From an end-user standpoint it's fabulous and it's so obvious, once you see it. If you've ever tried to establish a Net connection for your office, you will appreciate [the InterJet].

"It's a non-trivial set of tasks, and they've automated 90 percent of them. You dial into your ISP and come back in 10 minutes and everybody's on the Net. It's amazing; not like anything I've seen."

The InterJet elicits that kind of enthusiasm from usually jaded industry types. When Whistle presented its prototype to Zona last fall, the single analyst who saw it went around the office and forced other analysts to abandon whatever they were doing to come see it.

"We call this an Internet peripheral, because the term 'server' seems complicated to the market we're trying to reach," says Jim Li, Whistle's chief technical officer and one of the company's three founders. "We used trailing- edge technology, nothing exotic. We want to be able to manufacture thousands in a month, so it's plain vanilla."

For the record, the InterJet uses a lot of freeware, including Berkeley Standard Distribution Unix stripped down to 8 megabytes of memory and the Apache Web server with an Intel Corp. 486 chip. It comes bundled with Claris Corp.'s Home Page, Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator, and Qualcomm Inc.'s Eudora Lite, and provides a desktop "dropbox" that allows cross-platform file sharing. Through add-on cards, connections can be upgraded to full T1.

"We were conservative in tuning the software; we want to have an ISP install it on a site and be able to guarantee that it's up and running all the time," Li says of the device that began shipping in January.

"We want it to run for years and for people to not have to think about it, just like they don't think about what's inside their fax machines or laser printers," Li says. "We want it to be a small business Internet appliance, the kind of thing a small business would buy to get up and running just like they'd buy a laser printer."

Distribution is being handled through ISPs, with Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc., the first major company to make a commitment. Netcom plans to begin a "targeted and aggressive marketing and demand-creation campaign," including direct mail and seminars in six major markets focused on the InterJet later this month, according to Spike Bloom, the company's vice president of sales.

Source: Inter@ctive Week