Name: James Sha Age: 45 Place of Birth: Taipei, Taiwan Current Position: Vice President and General Manager of Integrated Applications, Netscape Communications Corp. Time in Current Position: Eight months Years in the Industry: 20 Car He Drives: 1994 Jeep Cherokee Favorite Non-Work Activity: Likes action movies, travel, and the stock market, but "I'm not addicted to anything." Prediction for the Future of Open Systems: "The Internet puts a new demand on open systems and by nature it reinforces the openness. Also, to some degree, it hides the operating system's idiosyncrasies. The browser can browse anything on any server, so the specifics of the underlying platform become less critical. The Internet raises it to a higher layer of abstraction."
Pushing the performance envelope has been a trademark of Jim Sha's throughout his information technology career. As vice president and general manager of integrated applications for Netscape Communications Corp., Mountain View, CA, Sha has positioned himself on the cutting edge of the electronic marketplace. And now Sha is playing a leading role in bringing leading-edge technology to the UniForum '96 Conference as a member of the conference steering committee.
Netscape, formed early last year by James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, and Marc Andreesen, designer of the Mosaic World-Wide Web browser, brought most of the Mosaic design team from Illinois to Silicon Valley to produce products for the mushrooming Internet and World-Wide Web market. Sha was recruited from Oracle last August.
Netscape is now producing a line of TCP/IP-based software to enable electronic commerce and secure information exchange on the Internet and private networks. Besides its now-ubiquitous Web browser, Netscape Navigator, the company has brought out a line of server products and Internet applications. The latter consists of turnkey applications that enable companies to conduct full-scale electronic commerce. They enable high-volume transaction processing, real-time data management, interfaces, and secure communications.
"We build products to allow people to get content on-line," Sha says. "Companies are not interested in building technology-they are interested in building their business. If they can license a product from somebody, they will buy that product [from Netscape] and focus on what they do best. We're in that space, of building solutions that companies can use to get on-line quickly." Netscape not only builds the Internet-enabling products but also consults with customers to help them get started. One of Netscape's first customers was MCI, in a project to start that company's marketplaceMCI, a kind of on-line shopping mall.
Netscape's Internet products go by such generic names as Merchant System, Publishing System, and Community System. Merchant System allows large retailers to create virtual shopping areas where customers can carry around an electronic shopping cart and purchase items from various merchants at one time. "We take care of the whole shopping mall, from management to payment," Sha says. "It's a completely automated process without operator intervention, so the company saves a lot of costs."
Sha reports that several newspapers-as yet unnamed-are beta customers of the Netscape Publishing System. "A number of companies want to be XX Online, and you fill in the name of the company," Sha reports. "Our solution is generic. It's also an efficient way of exchanging documents, so Fortune 1000 companies are interested in using this system to disseminate their information."
After beginning his career with Burroughs in Orange County, in Southern California, Sha returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for Control Data Corp. in Sunnyvale, in the networking area. In 1978 he joined Intel, where he worked initially on an in-circuit emulator, a device invented by Intel. Sha debugged the firmware and the hardware design for that device and later worked on a distributed operating system.
After four years at Intel, Sha joined a startup in Santa Clara, CA, called Sydis, now defunct. The company designed and built a leading-edge multiuser voice-enhanced office automation system that never generated enough sales. "The company believed the voice could be a very useful function of the office environment, for communication between co-workers, for voice annotation of documents and spreadsheets," Sha explains. To allow voice processing, the company built its own PBX, plus application processors, and a terminal with ISDN-like capability-"a very fancy product back in the early '80s," Sha says. He produced both the hardware and software architecture for the system, employing a distributed Unix running on Motorola 68000 processors. "It was a very high-end Unix machine," he says. "in that it went beyond data processing to the processing of telephone and voice."
After Sydis closed, Sha went to Wyse Technology, first as director of software and later as vice president of advanced systems. "In 1986 Wyse wanted to get into the Unix business, so we built a multiprocessor system," Sha says. "We licensed some technology from Sequent. We built a six-processor symmetric multiprocessor and symmetricized Unix System V release 3." Wyse launched the machine, the Wyse 9000i, in 1990, and targeted it to the low end of the Unix spectrum-to those who wanted a departmental, commercial Unix server. Eventually the Wyse systems became a family of three servers, each with different capabilities.
Sha left Wyse in 1990 to become vice president of Oracle's Unix division. There he managed porting, marketing, and relationships with vendors for a number of Oracle product lines. He also helped develop Unix-specific technologies like transaction processing monitors and cluster technology. He completed the porting of Oracle onto IBM's high-end SP2 platform and to a Pyramid massively parallel processing machine. "Basically, we were really pushing the hardware architecture," he says. "We were pushing the envelope of what could be done to sustain high availability and scalability."
Looking at Oracle database technology, Sha felt it was mature compared to the Internet's virgin territory. "I felt it was a tremendous opportunity to have a major impact on changing the way things are done between consumer and business, and from business to business," he says. As an example, he cites both electronic publishing and manufacturing. "Newspapers can save printing and mailing costs and manufacturers can save distribution costs, cutting through one or two tiers of distribution because they can reach their customers directly." Wherever their are costs to be saved, Sha believes the market potential is great. "People will think about how they want to solve their problem differently. Things will not change overnight-the traditional channel will still exist, but beyond the year 2000, a company in Asia that wants to sell products to the United States will see that the Internet provides a terrific medium."
Sha feels the surface of Internet commerce has just been scratched. Future development will come in the areas of on-line management and tools for use in demographic analysis, he says. "Moving forward, you will be seeing a lot of activity in advertising, usage reporting, and interactivity. The whole technology is moving fast and we're making it more media-rich, more appealing. We're moving to improve the offerings in manageability, scalability, and security. You've just seen the tip of the iceberg."
Sha also expects the Internet's development to have a positive effect on the spread of open systems. "What the Internet really does is bring the consumer into contact with open systems in an easier way," he says. "Before the Internet, open systems or client/server consisted of a LAN-based server, and to a small degree a WAN. The communications infrastructure was not quite there. Now, all of a sudden, the 100 million PC users throughout the world can all get on the Internet and connect to a different kind of server-basically a home page where people buy products and content. And in the longer term, companies may use the Internet backbone to implement client/server. So the demand for open systems will be higher because they will need bigger machines able to serve a lot more users. Secondarily, the Internet by nature is open because you don't care whether it's a Sun or a DEC or an HP server. The TCP/IP infrastructure is interoperable."