What makes Juice Software run? The answer doesn't come quickly. But here's the short of it from the New York-based start-up: It's a brand-new enterprise software platform that bridges the gap between the desktop and the network.

In essence, Juice allows users to take live data from a number of sources such as Bloomberg, Bridge and Telerate, and pipe it into customized spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. With the help of Juice's "application extenders" that run inside the spreadsheet, the data gets crunched and calculated in any which way templates are formatted.

Hence the term "Juiced" documents, and the genesis for the company's name. Its founders include Charles H. Ferguson, Ph.D, the creator of Web authoring tool FrontPage (now owned by Microsoft Corp); Allan Warren, Ph.D, who was the chief architect at Hyperion Solutions; and Kim Malone, formerly with CapitalThinking and telephony company deltathree.

It deploys Extensible Mark Up Language (XML) and is positioned to work with Microsoft's .NET Web services platform, which allows applications to communicate different data types regardless of operating system, device or programming language.

The main components of the Juice platform include the Java-based Server, which sits behind the client's firewall with a persistent connection and runs on all the major enterprise platforms; a client that runs on the user's desktop along with the application; data adaptors that connect a number of databases with the juice server and developer kits that help users tweak their data adaptors in their own applications.

Atnewyork recently spoke with Kim Malone, chief executive officer of Juice, about the opportunities with the product, including how "fat applications" are becoming cool again.

Q: What are your market opportunities for the product?

We have 33 pilot customers, 20 or so of them in financial services. In addition, we have four of the big five systems integrators. We're also working with several Fortune 500 companies. The areas most useful for them are in finance departments, or with CFOs in terms of monitoring expenses, P&L rollups, in Human Resources, and in market research. Pharmaceutical companies are using it in research to aggregate lots of information from lots of different places.

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(The pitch is) about analyzing high velocity data much more efficiently. Any time people are making decisions, or businesses are running on information that's changing, Juice can add value in terms of making it faster to analyze that data more accurately and sharing that data more efficiently.

Q: What would be an example of HR usage?

If you're pulling together data from a lot of different databases and analyzing or trying to figure out what percentage of people are busy doing things, that type of analysis.

The problem one customer was having was that (the management) couldn't combine information from time and expense reports with information from salaries in their database. The partners managing the consultants knew what percentage of time that people were busy, or they knew their salary, but they couldn't put the two together and figure out how significant it was. They didn't know the salaries of employees that were 50 percent utilized. They were able to figure out the (consultants') cost per hour.

Q: Who else offers this product?

There are some companies nibbling at this. It's not a secret that this problem exists (of how to compile different and real-time data sources in one spreadsheet).

Some content providers are working on allowing their customers to get their data into an Excel spreadsheet. But they're not allowing (customers) to get any data into any application. So they're providing a delivery mechanism for their data but they're not providing a generalized software tool.

Sometimes we get compared to what I call a persistent connection company. There are companies offering a persistent connection but they're not offering it for business users to get information anywhere into an application like Excel or Lotus Notes.

Q: How did you come up with the idea to start Juice?

I was working for a company called CapitalThinking, which is a commercial mortgage ASP here in New York. The commercial mortgage people had built business logic into spreadsheets and spent several months explaining that logic to developers and then spent several months building a Web site (for it). CapitalThinking customers took that (data), printed everything and typed it back into Excel.

That's where the core of the idea came from. (We asked ourselves) Isn't there a way to plug that sort of value-subtracting round trip? A very smart developer at CapitalThinking built a prototype of the Web site that would be delivered directly into Excel. When I saw that, a lightbulb went off. But frankly, it seemed like such a big, compelling idea we were shocked nobody else had done it. We thought there was some technical nuance we didn't know about.

Q: Why aren't more companies doing this?

I think part of the reason is that everybody was so excited by the browser that they forgot about these "fat applications." In fact, the term "fat app" was meant to be derogatory. Everything was supposed to move to thin client. But the fact of the matter is there's a reason why we all have computers. And there's a reason why these applications have developers because they're very useful. We use them every day. So I think that it was in part because of (everyone) being mesmerized by the browser for a while.

Part of it is the way that innovation happens. With brilliant new technologies like networking and the Internet and intranets, it takes a while for those things to pervade daily life. This is just another example of that.

Q: Of all the enabling underlying technologies and protocols (.NET, XML, data adaptors, extenders) what's the secret sauce?

If I had to narrow it down I would say the extenders, which make it back-end tangible to users. The second would be the technology to make that data more uniform, so it's the magic between the data adaptor, which figures out how to repackage that and the connection too. It's hard to say that XML enables it. It's the transport (mechanism) that adheres to open standards.

Q: Why did you choose to set up in New York?

One of the things that surprised me was how many mini-systems programmers there are around New York. One of the decisions we made was not to hire people out of college but to take people with 10 and 20 years of (programming) experience under their belt, who understand legacy systems.

(With that experience) they don't make many mistakes in coding, they can think things through. New York is a very good place to find those people.

So it was a critical decision to be in New York, originally made so we could be close to our customers. In fact, New York is a fantastic place to build a software company because there a lot of IT people here who have been in a supporting role (with major corporations).

Q: This is a powerful tool. Can people lose a long-term perspective about data when it's always fresh?

There are things we can do with our technology, like turning updates off, either for the whole document or cell by cell.

In terms of psychological barriers of getting too much information, it's about taking the non-value-add tasks out of the day and allowing (the users) time to think. Given that there is so much data out there, the less time you spend on grunt work of entering data, that liberates you to spend more time thinking about how you should react to it.

What we're doing is enabling people to automate pieces of their work that don't add value, which helps them use their minds instead of doing the grunt work.