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 NEWSMiddlewire takes radical approach to e-mail By Michael Vizard November 24, 2000 1:01 pm PT CTO David Knight believes that the e-mail market now requires a radically new type of service provider
InfoWorld: What's the history behind Middlewire?  Knight: Middlewire pulls together a lot of things that I've worked on over a period of years. I've spent a long time, about the last 10 years, in the world of electronic messaging, going back all the way to 1988 when we were having to convince people that they would want to send an e-mail outside of their company. I got involved with a lot of industry groups that would solve interoperability problems so that e-mail systems could settle down and become the pipeline that it is today. One of the things I was known for was being the multimedia-messaging guy. I was really involved with the concept of e-mail attachments. But as I looked at SMTP for carrying attachments, it was clear that this wasn't going to be the ultimate way that we beamed information around. [The SMTP standard] has no characteristics that would be suitable for machine-to-machine communication. So what you're going to need, as we move the old world of EDI [electronic data interchange] and EFT [electronic funds transfer] into the new world IP, is a service. So that sparked the idea for Middlewire. InfoWorld: So what is Middlewire's mission? Knight: We've been working on a pretty scalable technology that assumes that there can be hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world carrying traffic back and forth much like the way phone networks work. And this network had to have the quality of service associated with a phone call but would be used primarily for carrying data. That's a really big goal and it took us about 18 months to get where we are now, which is operating out of a large hub we call the Super Hub, in Sunnyvale, Calif. Eventually, we're going to build these hubs all over the world, and you'll make your connection through your local ISP into your nearest hub. It'll all be transparent to the user and blast your content over high-speed fiber-optic pipes to the other places in the world it needs to go. InfoWorld: What's compelling about being able to deliver e-mail over the Internet? Knight: What we've done is build a kind of a jet, which is a way to transmit huge amounts of information through the browser stream, but not through SMTP; SMTP is only used to tell you where the jet is going to go. We just changed the transport system. You can do anything in a browser. You can display, convert, stream, and stop things, with much more fidelity than with normal e-mail. InfoWorld: How does this service provide a better way to manage e-mail? Knight: The biggest problem we have is that the vast majority of corporations limit the size of e-mail attachments. The reason for that has to do with how SMTP works. If you're going to move the same message with the same attachment to every single recipient, you're burning bandwidth and you're using up other people's storage. InfoWorld: What exactly is in the Middlewire hub? Knight: Our hub contains a lot of software and a bunch of fairly expensive hardware. We've got top-of-the-line Cisco routers, and the hub is fed by outrageously big feeds compared to what most people are used to -- 200Mbps full duplex feeds into the Internet. And we're in a global center facility, which belongs to Exodus. We've got a 40-by-70-foot wall of equipment to run this first hub. It's just a staggering amount of gear. InfoWorld: How does your service compare to content delivery systems on the Web? Knight: All those guys are chipping away at the Web page or multimedia caching where there's a point source -- which is typically a Web server or a media server. Basically they're rebroadcasting. If you look at them topologically, those Web-caching networks are deceptively similar to the way TV and radio broadcasting works. In the normal Web server model, it would be similar to saying that you're in California and to pick up NBC you have to have a 40-foot dish aimed at New York City. But that's not how it works. [The networks] eventually got to where the distances were so great that, rather than everybody having a giant antenna, they just rebroadcast it through the local network affiliates. This is a good approach when you have a point source that wants to talk to lots of things all over the world. Our topology is really different. We need a small number of very large hubs. I have one big connection to UUNet, for example, and one big one to World Net. We're initially going to build four of the giant hubs: one in Europe, this big one in America, and two in Asia. To take it to the next level, we would need to add probably about a dozen more if we wanted to really offer totally seamless global coverage, but that would literally have to include places such as Africa, South America, or Russia. InfoWorld: Is there a lot of demand for this type of service? Knight: Well, we can handle really sensitive corporate data. One of the big entertainment companies right now is having trouble getting marketing information on films and TV shows that aren't out yet to their distributors outside of the U.S., and they're really worried about sending it electronically. So they've been burning them on CDs and sending them out overnight. They send out hundreds at a time. And we've had two other companies show up with the same exact problem, so we're seeing a trend for people that do marketing, merchandising, and distribution in various industries. With this technology, you can send e-mail to all the recipients who click on a secure link and the stuff is tunneled to their desktops and you know exactly who got it and when they got it.
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