Software Eases Web Site Navigation

A Paris-based company that for three years has sold to European companies software designed to ease the deployment of applications over the Internet is making a push into the U.S. market.

Esual Software Inc.s software is targeted at businesses trying to find a way of making their Web sites, e-business applications, intranets and extranets more interactive while alleviating the burden on their back-end servers.

The companys products, which integrate with a business existing systems, include Esual Executables, tools that can be loaded onto a clients Web page. The library of executables—including such tools as Smart Search, which speeds up product or topic selection; Quick Search, which eases Web site navigation; Animator, which enables site developers to make objects move; and Active List, which sort up to 4,000 rows of data—are designed to solve a number of problems, from response time at a site being too slow to the site being too complex. Theyre also used to attract users to the site and to keep them there once theyre logged in.

The executables run on the Web site as the site is loaded up. Visitors at the site can configure the type of search they want to do via the executables, which take much of that load off the business back-end servers, said President and CEO Bruno Saint Cast.

"Before you had either a thin dumb client, or a fat rich client," Saint Cast said. "Now you can have thin and rich."

Other products include the Esual Configuration Studio, which enables users to customize the executables, and the Esual Execution Server, which uses caching and compression technology to more quickly query databases and access to server data.

The companys software runs on any Java-enabled device and, because it is backwards compatible to Java Virtual Machine 1.1, can run on most Windows, Macintosh and Unix platforms.

Saint Cast said the company will roll out a software developer kit within the next two to three month that will enable users to build any executable.

WStore Europe SA, which sells enterprise IT products on Web sites in both England and France, has been using Esuals Smart Search and Quick Search executables since 1999, according to Roland Tripard, marketing director.

The software enables customers to choose how they want to search the site and then how to select the desired product once they determine the category.

"The key is that the customer gets a real-time vision of how many products do match his request while he is setting up [the] criteria," said Tripard, in Paris. "Nothing is more annoying than setting up criteria and then getting a list of answers with 2,000 matches, or 0 matches."

For the company, the benefits are that demand on the companys servers are reduced as the data is loaded only once and then the search can run without any query to the server, he said.

The software is selling in the United States now, with pricing varying depending on use and the number of users.