Grand Central: A start-up to watch

By Ann Bednarz
Network World, 04/29/02

Boingo Wireless

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Grand Central Communications

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Company name: Recalls the glory days of railroads as they transitioned from point-to-point rail lines to hubs of interconnecting lines.

Origin: Founded in May 2000 by Halsey Minor, who also started CNET Networks and Snap.com.

Funding: A $23 million second round closed in December 2001, bringing the total to $28 million.

Key investors: Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Gryphon Holdings, JGE Capital, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.

CEO: Craig Donato, former senior vice president at Excite@Home.

Service: Web services-based network service.

Grand Central says Web services will provide the integration panacea companies desire. The San Francisco company has built a subscription service around managing the exchange of information between businesses and applications. At the core is a shared framework based on IBM MQ Series messaging middleware � Grand Central acts as a mediator for companies that don't want to implement and maintain middleware infrastructures, assuming the burden of security management, transaction messaging and quality of service. The idea is similar to electronic data interchange value-added networks of old. But instead of using a private network, Grand Central's service uses the Internet to route application traffic. It depends on Web services and accompanying standards, such as Simple Object Access Protocol and Web Services Description Language, to facilitate interactions between servers.

So far, customers Eastman Chemical, Putnam Lovell Securities, Thomas Weisel Partners and Wachovia like the idea. So does competitor Flamenco Networks, which offers a similar service. However, Grand Central could run into trouble if software development doesn't go the way of Web services.