ENTERPRISES LOOKING TO start the new year by squeezing efficiencies out of old ways of doing business will have new options in the emerging area of online document delivery. This week Airborne Express added electronic signature capabilities to its eCourier secure document delivery service, and early next year new kid on the block Radiance Technologies plans to launch its company and a digital delivery system that sends digital packages securely over the Internet.

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Airborne Express launched eCourier last year to tap into the growing demand for Internet-based document delivery, according to Al Burba, director of marketing at Airborne Express in Seattle. eCourier allows users to transmit secure files of any size or type to a single user or group of users, leveraging 128-bit encryption and password protection.

"We have seen attrition of the typical letter express business that FedEx, UPS, and Airborne Express are known for. Not to the point where it is scaring us, but certainly to the point that we acknowledge that different industries are moving to adopt this technology," Burba said.

The potential cost savings afforded by Internet document delivery, coupled with new security functions, will attract large enterprises that are focused on streamlining business operations, he said.

"Large Fortune 500 companies are looking for efficiencies in the way they communicate," Burba said. "Now that electronic data delivery is safe, secure, and now that you can sign it, we believe it is something those enterprises will rush to adopt."

In the future, Airborne plans to extend its eCourier service for residential deliveries, with a stand-alone app with a different security schemas, said John Kruzan, Airborne's e-commerce manager.

Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 2002, Radiance Technologies will emerge from a year-long development effort to introduce a "virtual FedEx" system designed to transmit digital packages of any format or size.

The Radiance software offering aims to take over where corporate e-mail systems typically fail: handling the delivery of large digital files, documents, or videos, according to John McCrea, senior vice president of marketing at Radiance, in Los Altos, Calif.

"E-mail systems are good at delivering digital letters, but if you get into things over a couple megabytes in size, the e-mail system really can't scale," McCrea said.

As opposed to enterprise CDN product solutions that cache Web content at the edge of the network in anticipation of a download, Radiance lets enterprises deliver any digital package to an individual, group, or server. Radiance will enable enterprises "to have their own virtual FedEx," McCrea said.

Moreover, the Radiance offering will help overcome bandwidth constraints between the enterprise campus and field office locations, a problem that often forces digital assets to be transferred to CD-ROM or VHS tape and physically delivered.

"It is our belief that if something is inherently digital it is absurd to go through the expense and time cost of duping it to a physical media and delivering it through interdepartmental mail or FedEx," according to McCrea.

The Radiance delivery system will feature end-to-end encryption, compatibility with digital rights management solutions such as Windows DRM, and will run on open hardware platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris.