Newly armed with a U.S. patent, McAfee.com Corp. is proclaiming itself king of Web-based services and says it will defend its crown in court.
"If there is anybody else that wants to deliver the services the way we do, it would behoove them to talk to us or work on engineering around the patent," says Srivats Sampath, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of McAfee.com.
Sampath says his online security software company filed for the patent more than three years ago "purely to protect the investment and our 'first-in-space' position."
With close to 1 million monthly visitors to its Web site and 1 million paid subscribers to its service, McAfee is a significant player in the application service provider (ASP) field. But it is far from alone in using the ASP business model.
"Apparently, what McAfee has done is they've patented their own version of the ASP model: their own particular product and service of a security-based solution delivered through the ASP model," says Jim O'Reilly, communications director for the ASP Industry Consortium. "I don't think there is any way for anyone to patent the ASP delivery model. There are so many different components, offerings, and products. I can't possibly believe there can be a patent to encompass every possible solution through every ASP."
Standard or threat?
The patent applies to the way McAfee.com operates its business, but not the concept of the ASP business model, says Harry Fenick, CEO of the Segaza Group (formerly known as Zona Research).
"They have a very specific technology that is highly optimized to delivering what you need and configuring and managing those configurations," Fenick says. "I don't think this stops everyone else in their tracks. It's not an attempt to declare McAfee.com the one and only standard for doing this."
Still, being granted the patent is important to McAfee.com because it puts competitors on notice.
"In a world of standards-based computing, if you have a good idea, you really do need to patent it," Fenick adds. "Otherwise, it's very easy for people to mimic and cross that magic boundary into the netherworld of plagiarism."
Between 1000 and 2000 ASPs are operating, ranging from start-ups to software giant Microsoft, says O'Reilly of the ASP Industry Consortium. Microsoft's new .Net initiatives are intended to support each aspect of developing, managing, using, and experiencing XML Web services. Microsoft and McAfee.com announced an alliance on May 22, saying they would work cooperatively to incorporate .Net technologies and enterprise servers into McAfee.com's online services and elsewhere.
McAfee.com invests
McAfee describes its patent, U.S. Patent 6,266,774, as covering the company's "software-as-a-service" technology and subscription-based business model for delivering security, maintenance, and optimization services for Internet users.
The patent covers the capability to deliver software encapsulated within markup language (HTML/XML) that is delivered by browser over the Internet to execute scripts and automatically perform tasks on a PC, says Sampath, who is a co-inventor of the McAfee.com technology.
He says McAfee.com spent up to fifteen staff years and $30 million developing the mechanisms that can detect and remove viruses, search for software and data that needs updating, upgrade the software and data, archive information, and perform online diagnostics. The company is a subsidiary of Network Associates.
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