SAN FRANCISCO — Web-based training is making significant strides due to the combined efforts of DigitalThink Inc., a two-year-old startup, and its relationship with several major engineering companies.

DigitalThink already has 20,000 registered users worldwide, and its engineering customers include Intel, Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems and Lucent Technologies. All are deploying DigitalThink's multimedia training courses for customers over the public Internet, and for in-house design engineers over private intranets.

In fact, Intel and TI have each made significant financial investments in DigitalThink, based on the projected profitability of the Web-based training industry. A recent study by International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.) found that sales of such training could reach $6 billion in just a few years.

"The hardware business is one of the first businesses that really embraced this technology," said Pete Goettner, chief executive officer and president of DigitalThink. "Mainly because the product is so technical in nature, and difficult to learn, and there's such a huge demand to keep the content up-to-date."

Solid template
Indeed, the company has found favor among the crýme de la crýme of industry companies. Janet Woodworth, manager of Intel's technical developer's Web site, said DigitalThink has provided a template for use across the entire company's Web intranet. "We have this virtual community within Intel," she said "and [DigitalThink's model] is serving as a model for lots of other groups here."

Mike Hendershot, program manager of the training site added, "We wanted to reach designers and developers of embedded applications who were considering Pentium processors, and provide them a technical overview." Apparently, DigitalThink helped them do that soundly — expectations in traffic and in ease-of-use for the virtual "students" have been notable.

Intel's first Web course, available over its external Web developer's site, is called "Pentium Processor Architecture for Embedded Design." The site is constructed to have the look and feel of a college classroom.

A user gets a virtual "locker," an orientation and a live instructor (it's Curt Durrant, senior technical marketing engineer in Intel's embedded microcomputer division). Durrant was instrumental in preparing the course's content and even helped design it, with the 28.8-kbit/second customer in mind. "We wanted to make sure that a user could access it as easily at home as an engineer with a T1 line," he said.

Intel has made a serious commitment in this area. Durrant answers several e-mails a day from students, and also logs onto the chat forum to discuss such topics as branch target prediction, cache organization and superscalar architecture.

Also included on-site is an in-depth look at the evolution of Intel architecture, and students can also find RealAudio clips, an easily navigable syllabus, hands-on exercises and even short quizzes with immediate analysis of answers.

The Intel site significantly leverages the Web's potential. The course is self-paced; note-taking is unnecessary due to the archived material; it's all searchable; and school never closes.

In preparing such a course, DigitalThink sticks to a certain "methodology," according to Goettner. "First, we put together an instructional plan, which encompasses every single detail: lessons, multimedia, quizzes and exercises, and from there we work directly with the experts at the companies who write the content, such as Curt Durrant, to whom we offer feedback. We're really New Age editors in a sense, as we also do production work as a site evolves."

DigitalThink now offers over 50 virtual courses for the engineering industry, both "off the shelf" and custom, in embedded design, programming instruction in Java, C and C++, and Perl for programmers, developers, system administrators and end users. The Java curriculum drills down even further with advanced courses in Java Beans, Java Security and Java and Databases.

"Things are happening fast," said Goettner. "This year we'll see well over 100,000 seats of training. This is the new way to train people. We're building a learning environment — not just a way to distribute stuff."

Texas Instruments is so impressed with DigitalThink that it will make Web-based training a part of its e-commerce initiative, which is set to be rolled out next month. "We'll be selling DSP tools over the Internet shortly, and the training will be running parallel, as a companion offering," said Jane Hertz, TI's Internet executive producer.

Doug Razor, vice president of strategic marketing at TI, said DigitalThink keeps it simple but effective. "They really understand what Web technologies work. They don't spend time re-inventing the wheel."

Stays with standards
Indeed, Goettner said his company steers away from proprietary plug-ins and chooses the popular RealAudio and RealVideo as enablers for multimedia content. The company also employs Java on the back end on its servers, and small quick-loading applets enhance most courses.

TI has an interest in bringing such training over its public site next month: "DSP is well-known to a fairly large audience, but certainly not to the broad engineering community," said Razor. "People are still learning about DSP and how to take advantage of it."

Accordingly, TI is planning on launching a basic DSP training course, much in line with Intel's model,early in June. "If that is successful, we'll move into the other DSP families. And we're even thinking about vertical markets, such as wireless communications, one of our biggest markets for DSP."

Razor said that after a ten-year history of physical regional technology training centers, TI could sense that the Web's convenience could offer rich benefits. "It appeals to customers, as they don't have to fly their engineers all over creation to go take a course — and engineers can take as much time as they need to on individual topics."

DigitalThink has also partnered with SunU, Sun Microsystems' corporate university, to deliver courses in Web programming, the Internet and Java programming — potentially to all 25,000 Sun employees.

There are some nagging concerns that DigitalThink's control of content could become bane to such powerful corporations as Intel and TI. Virtually all course content is stored on the five SunSparc servers on DigitalThink's grounds.

"It's something we've had to sell though," said Pete Goettner, "but the question ultimately becomes, 'Do you really want to get in the business of Web-based training?' The cost of doing it is not cheap. If you want to do a brochure, that's fine, that's Intel.com at the point. But if you're talking about training, it's just like being a publisher or a printer."

However, Mike Hendershot at Intel is cautious. "For this embedded course pilot, it was the most expedient way to do it [giving over content to DigitalThink servers]. And our relationship so far has been good in having them host the content, but we might have to reexamine the overall program at some point, and see exactly what resources are involved here."