Economies Of Scale
The Age
Tuesday March 27, 2001
MARTIN Duursma clicks on his Pocket PC, opening a view of his standard office e-mail program.
He sifts through the bold-faced unread mail in the Outlook inbox, which, he says, has handled close to 13,000 items over the past 11 months. He wants to open a fresh e-mail with a bulky attachment, to prove how easy it is to handle a big file over a narrowband connection.
Ordinarily, he would do most of his work from his office or home PC.
"This is only used for getting out of jail," he says. "It is only for when I really need to do something urgently and there's no other option."
The communications link is precarious - and quite expensive, when compared to conventional land line communications.
He has the shiny new Compaq iPAQ on a table in front of him, sitting with an infrared port aligned with that on the base of a Motorola GSM phone, connected to the Optus Mobile network.
It's all standard, off-the-shelf hardware, software and communications plans. Nothing special, except that the Compaq iPAQ model No. 3630 is expensive at more than $1000 and few people have their systems properly configured to handle such sophisticated data traffic.
Duursma is perhaps a little privileged.
But he cannot explain now. If he moves the PC or the phone suddenly, the infrared link may be disturbed and the data transfer could be jeopardised.
The connection is awfully slow, he reckons, with a throughput of about 2400 bps. GSM data transfer rates can be as high as 9600 bps but that is only in an ideal situation.
Nevertheless, in a minute or two, he has all his e-mail at his disposal. Thousands of e-mail items. Not just one at a time. All of them.
Importantly, he does not want to select something with sensitive information, as I peer over his shoulder at the portrait-shaped color screen, with 240 x 320 pixels.
I have already been told there are a few things he is not prepared to divulge about the software he is working on. Not just yet.
He selects an item that carries a harmless Word attachment, 128K in size.
He double clicks on the Word document icon and after a short wait, it appears, on the half-sized VGA screen, in color, roughly one quarter the size of an SVGA screen that most office workers are familiar with.
A patch inside a small tile in the upper right corner indicates which portion of the "SVGA" screen view he is looking at. He can slide on the indicator inside the patch to move the view - up, down, left or right. It is a fluid motion, not jerky or stilted because there is no big buffer of data transferring in and out of the device.
Even though he is reading a formatted document that takes up 128K in a proprietary software program, his communications link is such that it requires as little as 5kbps for him to activate the application without him noticing any delay. He does not quite have that speed but the wait is minimal.
He does not have the software on his pocket computer. He is looking only at a "view" of the software that is operating on his company's server back in his office across the road.
Had Duursma been attempting to download a 128K Word document over a connection wavering at or below 2400bps, it could have taken up to an hour.
"But instead I view it straight off the server," Duursma says.
He can read the whole document in a miniaturised landscape frame on the whole iPAQ screen width, or he can move the portrait-shaped view to any size that he designates.
He is familiar with this panning and scaling technique because it was his software team in Sydney that designed and wrote it.
DUURSMA is vice-president of product development with Citrix Systems, a United States networking software company based in Florida.
But he does not live near Fort Lauderdale, the company headquarters. He runs his R&D lab from an office on Sydney's north shore, from where he also coordinates another software engineering lab in Japan. Citrix has seven engineering centres like this worldwide.
Duursma joined the company when an operating system software outfit he co-founded in the late 1980s, DataPac Australasia, was acquired by Citrix for $US5 million in September 1997.
It was the first of several overseas acquisitions by a software company that enjoyed revenue of $US470 million in 2000.
Duursma says DataPac started out in 1988 as an operating system development company - an unusual focus in Australia - specialising in multi-user versions of DOS.
It was successful in installing point-of-sale computer systems for shops, pharmacies and video rental outlets.
System Manager, the flagship product, did not work with Windows applications, so in the mid-1990s DataPac decided to customise the Winframe software from Citrix, which was also focused on multi-user environments but for Windows.
DataPac at that stage was exporting its DOS-based products around the world through a network of distributors and Citrix did not have an office in Australia.
Duursma and his business partner at the time, Peter Campbell, travelled to the Citrix head office four years ago to make a presentation about their company, also showing off some of the R&D activity the company was involved in.
``This surprised people over there, because they weren't really aware of us doing a lot of this stuff in Australia," Duursma says.
The Sydney base for Citrix is in a relatively new corporate park at North Ryde that already houses the database software company, Oracle, the microelectronics and optical networking outfit, Radiata, and soon the new expanded Microsoft Australia headquarters.
Citrix is in a building with Syntegra, a subsidiary of British Telecom, as anchor tenant on the ground floor. Fujitsu Australia occupies a floor above.
With telecom heavyweights as neighbors there is more than an adequate supply of optical fibres to the doorstep and room for expansion for a data-thirsty company. Good news for a software outfit that specialises in networking protocols, an observer would suspect.
Ironically, it is the chronic shortage of reliable fast data communications to much of Australia's office staff, home offices and field workers that gives Citrix an advantage as it pitches the new version of its flagship software, Metaframe XP for Windows. Earlier versions of Metaframe also run on three flavors of Unix, Sun's Solaris, HP-UX and IBM's AIX.
Citrix writes software so network managers can pipe software applications running on a remote server to a client through a narrowband connection.
A user does not require a full copy of the software application to run it. The only client required is Citrix's own Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) client, which can run on devices as diverse as a standard PC, a Windows terminal from Wyse, a Sun Ray from Sun Microsystems, an IBM Netstation or a handheld computer like the Compaq iPAQ, for which the Australian engineers devised the panning and scaling when the first Windows CE devices were first built. The important connection is that of the Metaframe software on the server, where hundreds or thousands of computers running the ICA client software can tap into a server to access the software and process information.
It is widely used in corporate computer networks where large numbers of computers or terminals access or input data into large data centres. There are more than 24 million users of Citrix multi-user access technology worldwide.
The recent introduction of some powerful new handheld computers with good quality screens is making it more likely that staff in the field will be crunching numbers while on the move.
Duursma demonstrated his iPAQ with a Compaq wireless LAN card on a Citrix technology roadshow in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane earlier this month, selecting a 6MB Powerpoint presentation to display how nimble the connection could be. He says a demonstration of a wireless device is the classic demonstration of thin computing.
Duursma's team of more than 20 engineers has a new role within the Citrix development cycle - which explains his caution in handling e-mail in front of visitors.
It is now the Sydney unit's job to identify potential new software products, to work on them, develop a pilot project and then convince Citrix's head office to commercialise. He declines to say what is in the pipeline but points out some of the previous work that has made it to market from the Australian developer team.
Last year it completed a version of the ICA client program to run native on OS/2, the IBM PC operating system that is widely deployed in Europe's financial sector.
It has also built a system called Speedscreen 3. Frustrated with the on-screen delays of between 300 and 400 milliseconds in filing administrative information on remote computer servers across the Pacific, the Sydney group was motivated to learn how to predict keyboard activity.
The Speedscreen feature guesses what the next keystroke would be to remove an apparent delay, or what is known as latency, for long-distance keyboard communications. This was experienced frequently when a computer user on the east coast of Australia was typing information directly into a computer server on the other side of the world.
``Speedscreen 3 has a local echo of keystrokes when a user is typing over high-latency links," Duursma explains. ``We predict what the user is typing locally and when the server actually catches up, it will override it, and it will make a prediction, which is 99 per cent correct. To the user, it feels as though they are just getting high-speed typing."
Core R&D is something that Duursma is proud to be involved with in Australia.
``We in Australia are big users of technology but are not renowned as big developers," he says. ``It is a case of taking other people's technology and applying it here - which is something we do very well."
But he said it was disappointing that Australia had yet to produce an IT company with the impact of a worldwide brand.
``As far as IT goes, we have only ever participated in the niche markets."
He applauds Commonwealth Government programs such as R&D grants and tax rebates to encourage more development locally but says there perhaps needs to be a more refined focus to R&D.
He is perhaps a little disappointed with the jack-of-all-trade, master-of-none approach by Australia's information technology industry.
``If we can encourage more overseas companies to do their core R&D here, there will be other spin-offs," he says.
``We need a mission - if we say we want to be the best in the world in a particular field, it could happen. Smart cards, for instance, is one area where Australia has a lot of expertise."
He sees the Australian research work performed locally for Citrix as a commitment to a higher level of research, part of a mission.
But he says Citrix is not a typical software developer and was encountering some difficulty in identifying the best candidates for a planned expansion of its R&D arm.
It is looking for some more engineers to join the team - but needs a strange mix of skills and experience.
``Because we work at the operating system level, people need to have a knowledge of how the OSs work, as well as communications protocols, as well as some idea of the underlying hardware," he says.
``You need to understand the constraints of the hardware.
``The way I describe it is we sort of work at the holy grail of computer science. It is hard to find people with both hardware and OS background as well as good programming skills."
In the search for new engineers, Duursma is finding that a large number of former IT contractors are contemplating a return to full-time work.
Many of them have experience in internal software development projects and would face a big change in their work patterns.
``A lot of software work here (Australia) is applications-orientated development. They are turning out end-user applications," Duursma says.
``I suppose it is unusual we are doing core R&D for a worldwide product. We're not developing applications for internal deployment within a bank.
``The whole product development cycle is very different."
He says it is not so much faster or slower but more rigorous, because of the third-party compatibility issues.
Beta testing to ensure that 24 million users can use the software makes it a different proposition to testing a program to be used on a couple of hundred workstations.
© 2001 The Age