AvGen's customers come in all shapes and sizes - but they all have one thing in common. Each believes that distributing information - whether operational data or management and control information - throughout their organisation (and sometimes to the industry as a whole) is an essential part of an effective enterprise. Solutions utilising the power of client/server technology, intranets and the Internet can make the difference between success and failure.

Two major obstacles make this achieving this a difficult, and sometimes a dangerous exercise.

Firstly, web database design is not for the faint-hearted. Many vendors provide package solutions to this requirement, but the technology involved in building a fully-functioning, interactive, web-based information resource is normally something only the largest organisations can consider.

Just as important is security. While a stand-alone web site may be vulnerable to unauthorised access by third parties, the worst that can happen is that pages can be altered or deleted. When a website is directly connected to an organisation's in-house database, the possible risks are far more extreme, ranging from malicious destruction or theft of data, to more subtle (but much harder to detect) interference with corporate information.

AvGen is able to offer its own unique approach to web database design. By completely separating the back-end database (SQL Server or Oracle, for example) from the front-end internet/intranet server, data security is significantly improved. The conventional approach involves the internet server running scripts which directly access the database. By contrast, AvGen's solution is to interpose a completely separate middle tier of business logic and rules which determine exactly how access to the database (for both interrogation and updates) is controlled.

The AvGen approach also has the benefit that what was previously a difficult and cumbersome task - writing script-based web database applications - becomes much a more straightforward exercise.

Typical uses of AvGen's solution are interactive web applications, online internet/intranet information services and dynamic content publishing.