Tribeca's set of software products will provide a bridge between the technical world of web eBusiness infrastructure -- a world of network protocols, arcane log files, complex hardware and software architectures -- and the world of business, where all technology investments, no matter how sophisticated and dazzling the technology, must be justified in terms of clear financial and strategic goals, over some specific time-frame.

Tribeca's products will be used by organizations which deliver eBusiness services to their customers (B2C), and to other businesses (B2B). These products will be installed at our customers' Internet and Extranet web sites, will automatically monitor activities at those sites, and will provide a wide variety of advanced reporting features to measure the business success of the customers' eBusiness efforts.

Tribeca's analytic reporting system, the cornerstone of our business intelligence products, will provide answers to questions such as the following:

• Is my eBusiness meeting its goals in attracting and retaining profitable customers? How do I recognize those customers? Are there numbers increasing or decreasing at my sites over time? What can I do get more profitable customers, and customer visits?

• How successful is each piece of content at my site in helping me meet my eBusiness goals. Which ad views, product reviews, promotions, etc., are contributing to each of my business goals over time?

• How successful is my eBusiness in encouraging my visitors through various desirable "conversion points" -- from a visitor to a buyer, from a buyer to a loyal customer, etc. How does each aspect of my site, from content to site design, contribute to these processes? How can I improve this?

• Which elements of system and network infrastructure are contributing to, or are thwarting, my business goals? Am I losing sales because of bandwidth or system bottlenecks? Are shopping carts being abandoned because of poor system performance?

• What is the overall "trajectory," or direction of my eBusiness at meeting my eBusiness goals? What can the patterns of eBusiness activity tell me about the future? Are the numbers of loyal customers increasing or decreasing? What will eBusiness sales be in six months?

• What is my return on investment for my eBusiness infrastructure? How much does it cost me to attract a visitor? To convert a visitor into a buyer? To create a loyal customer?

In order to truly measure eBusiness success, our software must embody an understanding of two very different technical areas -- Internet network and system architecture on the one hand, and business analysis on the other. The challenge here is that until now, these two areas of analysis have been the provinces of two very different kinds of analytic software -- network/systems performance systems, and traditional business intelligence systems. These two areas have been separated by at least three enormous divides: First, a technical divide (in terms of the software technologies used to address them), second, a cultural divide (in terms of the engineers who work on the two sets of problems), and third, a political divide (in terms of the different groups in a customer organization to whom these solutions are sold).

There have been tremendous recent technological strides in these two separate areas. Network/system analysis has seen advances like event correlation, root cause analysis, and a variety of sophisticated service monitoring schemes. Meanwhile, business intelligence has been revolutionized by OLAP, multi-dimensional data warehousing, data mining, and sophisticated statistical analysis.

Yet paradoxically, the technological area with the most explosive growth, web-based Internet and Extranet systems, have produced no truly innovative in analytic technologies to support their successful business operation. In particular, the most prevalent architecture for web analysis, clickstream processing, is mired in a dead-end competition of commoditized, me-too reporting systems. Companies like WebTrends, Accrue and netGenesis fight it out with an expanding set of indistinguishable reports based on a single, impoverished, overly-technical data source -- the web log. And while the more sophisticated of these companies talk about delivering business-level metrics, and talk about supporting advanced analytic techniques, their limited data source and narrow architecture could never really support such sophisticated approaches.

A NEW ARCHITECTURE

Tribeca Software recognizes that eBusiness technology must be analyzed in terms of its contribution to eBusiness goals, and that this requires a sophisticated merger of computing, network and business technologies which has not been realized in existing software. Tribeca has therefore created an entirely new architectural structure, which we call Unison, to address this requirement.