One of John O'Keefe's pivotal moments in his career was in 1994, the year before he graduated from the University of Buffalo with a civil engineering degree.

That was the year the Bronx native decided against launching an Internet Service Provider company to instead build software products that help ISPs serve their customers.

He founded Fine Point Technologies in 1994, and incorporated it in 1997 with the first product, Total Internet.

It became popular software ISPs use to help non-techie users sign-up for Internet service, configure their machines, find drivers and all that stuff they'd rather not bother with before surfing.

Fast-forward to today, as Mom and Pop ISPs have become commodity service providers amid price wars and customer churn. Some ISPs no longer survive, but Fine Point Technologies has stayed in business by diversifying its products ahead of the market.

These days, plenty of broadband providers as well as dial-up ISPs use the company's products, such as its WinPoet/MacPoet software used in Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet deployment.

But now that Microsoft has embedded standard PPPoE code in its XP operating system and applications, it's only a matter of time before the company's own proprietary software becomes commoditized as well.

O'Keefe chatted with atNewYork.com about how the company is looking ahead and configuring products that evolve with a rapidly changing industry.

Q: How has your market changed and where is the ISP market going?

It's definitively obvious with the small mom and pop ISPs that with the emergence of broadband, a major percentage of the market has shifted to telecommunications and cable companies (as providers). For DSL broadband you have to go through the telcos and for cable broadband you have to go through the cable companies, and it's really just cut the legs off the (dial-up) ISPs.

Fine Point as a company anticipated this in 2000 and made certain we were making the shift to not only supporting the dial-up industry but to support the broadband industry. And our competitors at the time didn't anticipate that soon enough, so some have gone out of business and some are still struggling.

Our focus is the telcos and the cable companies. I'm not saying we're not licensing to ISPs. There's still a substantial market out there. But I think that we're probably stronger with ISPs now than we were before because we're seen as a more stable company because we're working with larger telcos.

The sales of our founding product, Total Internet, which catered to the dial-up industry, started decreasing in 2000. We're still licensing it today but it doesn't generate the bulk of (the company's annual sales) that it was.

We're constantly looking out in the future and constantly diversifying, you know, for what is coming three or five years from now when people slow down on signing up for broadband. We make sure we continue with products catering to the same type of market, the service provider market. That's what we did when we went with (being the lead developer) with the WinPoET/MacPoET product.

Q: Can you give us a 60-second overview of recent products?

We try to help providers shorten their development cycle on incorporating help-desk type CDs with an off-the-shelf product. Our latest one, for example, is a product called CyberTruck, based on the truck roll term, and targeted to the cable broadband providers.

What cable companies will do when they want to sign up a user for broadband service is they will send out a truck roll which sets up the users' computer. A truck roll on its own could cost $150 to $250 per truck roll. Our software is intended to be a replacement for the truck roll.

So what the cable company can do is take their DOCSIS-compliant (which stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) cable modems, put them in the box, put our CD in the box with it, and drop it off at The Wiz or CompUSA.

So someone like my mom can purchase the box with a modem, put the CD in, and it will take her through the four steps of the installation process.

The first is pre-qualification to qualify whether the computer is capable of supporting a broadband connection (test the CPU the memory, disc space, for example). Once the machine qualifies, we then turn around and configure the system (such as) the e-mail, (and) detect and configure the installed network card.

We then deploy the device drivers required for the modem, any software and also optional browser software such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. It's all done with the (ISP's) own branded interface.

Then once the installation process is finished, we go to the verification phase where it performs tests on the line ... to make sure we can route the user out to the network.

Then we come back to the user and give a red light or green light status for connecting to the Internet. This is all behind the scenes, by the way. At that point, the software enters the activation phase, and (what we think) is powerful tool for cable companies.

My mom may have already gone and picked up the cable modem and installed it, but the cable company doesn't know yet that she's online. So our software takes information that she's provided, her name, address, it could be a cable account number or a phone number, and works with the cable providers' back office billing system to physically insert the data. Now the cable company knows she's online and should be billed for service.

Q: You recently attended the big Western Cable Show, where broadband was naturally the hot topic. Beyond that, what were you hearing and seeing?

The thing that seemed to be emerging is the delivery of value-added services, whether it's streaming MPEG video, or providing additional firewall services to broadband. There is definitely a huge buzz about digital cable set-top boxes.

Walking around the show, that was some of the tech I was impressed with, like digital television demos, much more high-end stuff than, say, the DTV that Time Warner has been sending out. Those were getting lots of demos. It's all stemming from delivery of content and services through the set-top box.

Pioneer, Motorola, all the big players in set-top boxes were there showing off their TiVo-like functions. To me, it's obvious when you go to a show like this that a lot of companies are trying to help cable companies enter the broadband market.

Billing systems for cable companies aren't designed to bill for Internet service; I saw a lot of companies pushing broadband Internet service billing, a lot of the services that can be sent through a cable connection to a desktop computer -- streaming video, service delivery such as service activation -- even online cable services such as signing up for cable channels and this and that online.

Dealing with Internet services is a new theology for cable companies. They're used to delivering channels and stuff through the TV set. Now they're talking about deploying service to computers. That's a new theology for this antiquated market to become accustomed to.