“Midwest Internet Providers new business unit lands major
project that will build end to end Linux based Point of Sale
solutions delivered over the Internet as an ASP service.“
“Jeff Gerhardt, CTO of Pinnacle Internet, with offices in Aurora
IL, Naperville IL, Wonder Lake IL and Chicago IL; today announced
the signing of a multimillion dollar development agreement with
Hyperion Webware Inc. of Aurora IL. “We are very pleased
to announce the conclusion of negotiations and the signing of a
contract that we anticipate will generate near ten million dollars
in revenues over the next three and a half years. The project is
the first for our new ASP (Application Service Provision)
business unit, and in effect elevates that group to our second
largest business unit behind our business Internet services. We
spent a great deal of time and money over the last several months
engineering a network that would provide a solid infrastructure on
which to deliver ASP services to business partners. An ASP project
is different from `traditional’ ISP services (if you can use
traditional and ISP in the same sentence), in that we are building
software solutions that will be delivered over the Internet as a
virtual LAN or WAN. So, we are not only providing the end user with
a connection to the Internet, but with the specific application
they will run as well. In the specific case with Hyperion, they are
the developers of a number of DOS and Windows Point of Sale
systems. We are re-engineering the software so that it is
web-enabled using CGI, Perl and C. The goal is to put all of the
actual processing out on the network and designing a Linux? based
thin client by which the end-user will access the application. The
long-term goal of the project is to provide the business end-user
with FREE point of sale terminals and charge a very small monthly
service fee. It is very possible within 12-18 months that Hyperion
will not only give away the systems, but the connectivity and
service as well. There is millions to be made on the back end
transaction processing and inventory fulfillment alone.”