InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

March 27, 2000

Fast, Phat Sites
If performance and "cool" content are your Web-site goals, new content-delivery services may be the answer

By Bob Wallace

Related links:

DSL Providers Partner On New And Enhanced Services (2/21/00)

Akamai Acquisition Will Aid Streaming Media Push (2/14/00)

TechEncyclopedia

Need a definition of a technology term? Look it up here:

Send Us Your Feedback

ollege basketball's March Madness could have been mayhem for SportsLine.com Inc. But the company's popular sports sites were able to handle peak rates of 333,000 hits per minute and deliver pages up to 15% faster during the first four days of the tournament thanks to caching services from Akamai Technologies Inc. SportsLine.com was also able to serve more than 14,000 simultaneous audio streams to fans using a new Akamai streaming media service.

Many companies are eager to offer dynamic content to keep online customers at their sites longer--and potentially boost sales. Several caching network operators last week moved to bolster their networks and lay the foundation for a range of new services, including improved streaming audio and video, content delivery to mobile devices, software distribution, bandwidth management, and, eventually, the ability to process international E-commerce transactions.

Web-hosting vendor Exodus Communications Inc. forked over $637 million for a minority stake in content-distribution provider Mirror Image Internet Inc. As part of the deal, Exodus customers will get easy access to Mirror Image's caching network. Exodus will begin selling Mirror Image's content-distribution services to its customers in the third quarter. Mirror Image plans to add international transaction processing some time after that.

Adero Inc., another content-distribution provider, bought StarBurst Software, a provider of software for content broadcasting over the Web, and Fast Engines Inc., which makes software for quickly delivering personalized Web content. Digital Island Inc., a competitor, says it plans to add content delivery to mobile devices and other services by year's end. Last month, Akamai paid $2.8 billion for Intervu Inc., a company that produces and distributes streaming media.

These content-distribution companies are betting that businesses will turn to them for services to enhance Web sites because it's faster and cheaper than doing so on their own. Analysts say that's a good bet. Research firm Jupiter Communications forecasts that the worldwide market for Web-content distribution and delivery products and services will soar from $374 million this year to $6 billion in 2004.

Peter Christy, a VP at Jupiter, says content-distribution providers let companies focus on building more robust and feature-rich Web sites by off-loading infrastructure issues. "The content-distribution providers have come a long way in a short period of time," he adds. "And they have services such as content personalization and transaction processing in the pipeline."

SportsLine.com, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has been using Akamai for caching, which speeds delivery of Web pages by storing frequently requested content in servers around the country and serving it from the cache server closest to the user. The company decided to test the streaming-media service for live audio feeds and video highlights of the NCAA's annual college basketball tournament, under way now. The service should be commercially available in the next few months.

"Our top priority is to bring a great multimedia experience to the masses of sports fans," says Dan Leichtenschlag, senior VP of operations at SportsLine .com. By using Akamai, "our engineers could concentrate on applications to better present our content." He also sees benefits in Akamai's plans to deliver content to mobile devices by year's end.

The service providers hope Web-site operators will move much more--if not all--of their content to the caching networks. Among other benefits, the servers could eventually support local content and transactions in far-flung places. "We don't have a Web site outside the United States, but 15% of our business is from international customers," says Joe Dunnigan, president of BigDeal.com Inc., a Phoenix company and Adero customer that sells snowboards, skateboards, and waterboards. "A service that would let us sell more overseas would be super-interesting to us."

The idea of having Adero or a rival handle transaction processing doesn't bother BigDeal.com. "We already hand off part of the process to a shopping-cart provider and Visa today," says co-founder Mike Snyder. "We'd feel comfortable with Adero handling processing overseas, but the system would have to be very secure, and we'd want to see it up and running first."

Digital Island plans to offer by year's end software that would automatically sense the speed of a customer's connection to its server. That would enable data to be compressed and formatted to maximize the link speed.

American International Group Inc., a Digital Island customer, sees streaming media and bandwidth-optimization software as a potentially powerful combination. It recently began using streaming media to distribute content to some employees. Eventually, it plans to reach all 64,000 employees in 162 countries. "This could change the way we do business by eliminating the need to do massive videoconferences," says Michael Cohen, senior VP of the New York insurance company.

Users can expect more content-delivery services as providers continue to partner with or acquire companies that give them the expertise and technology to expand their portfolios, says Joel Yaffe, a senior analyst at Giga Information Group. Akamai bought Intervu to broaden its streaming media service. Says Yaffe, "This is only the early stage of an important market evolution."

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page