Groove Networks Inc. got a rolling start out of the blocks Monday, announcing the availability of its much-anticipated peer-to-peer (p-to-p) platform, along with its first sale to a leading pharmaceutical company.
GlaxoSmithKline PLC, a research-oriented pharmaceutical giant with over 100,000 employees, has agreed to purchase 10,000 copies of Groove 1.0. The product will allow teams of GlaxoSmithKline scientists to coordinate a number of research projects both internally and with collaborators from other companies and universities.
“These teams need to share information, and often times team members change as the project progresses. Groove appears to lend itself to our challenge of supporting these teams [in order to] assist their research,” said Ford Calhoun, GlaxoSmithKline’s chief information officer (CIO).
Groove has also signed agreements to sell Version 1.0 to Raytheon, which will also use it to coordinate projects among teams, and Syntek Technologies, which will use it to support a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project involving the study of human and software interaction.
“DARPA is now investigating how this (peer-to-peer-technology) can be applied to research it is conducting on aids for human reasoning. If this implementation is successful, it could lead to a full-scale project and a broader application of its concepts,” said Dr. John Poindexter, a senior vice president at Syntek.
Groove on Monday also shipped an enhanced version of its Groove Development Kit 1.0 (GDK), which has been recently updated to include examples of sample code to help developers more easily create Version 1.0 tools and applications.
The GDK has also been recently enhanced to better integrate Groove 1.0 tools and server-based applications as well as to provide support for more industry standard programming languages.
With the kit users can create p-to-p applications using just XML and scripting languages such as JavaScript. They can also create more advanced applications and user interfaces with Microsoft’s Visual Basic, C# and C++.
Other new utilities in the GDK include an improved database navigator and tool builder, and a set of publishing utilities that help programmers create more robust applications.
As for the platform itself, the company has set enterprise pricing at $49 per user, with Groove Enterprise Network Services costing $8 per user per month, although volume pricing is also available.
Hardware requirements for Version 1.0 include Windows ME, 95/98, NT or 2000, an Intel-based system with at least 48 megabytes of RAM and a 233 MHz Pentium processor, and Internet Explorer 4.0 or later.
Groove officials announced that the company has now signed over 200 partnership agreements since its October launch. These include BAE Systems, Quidnunc Group and Viant as Select partners, meaning those companies will be singularly focused on delivering products and solutions that fully exploit the Groove platform.
The Groove Preview Edition, which is a subset of the complete product, is available at www.groove.net at no cost for personal use.
