Mr.buzz, you continue to intrigue. Akamai and Sandpiper are excellent comparisons. As a non-techie (more of an info junkie but I've got lots of Silicon Valley tech buddies who provide the technical explanations), I would love more details about how ISLD's strategy compares to Akamai, Sandpiper and (I would think) Inktomi. Here are a couple articles on them Akamai and Sandpiper.
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The Journal of New England Technology
From Page 1 of the Jan. 18-24, 1999 issue of Mass High Tech
Akamai top brass says aloha to MIT
By Dyke Hendrickson associate editor DHendrickson@MassHighTech.com
A Cambridge company composed of some of MIT's top technology wizards recently launched
an enterprise that officials say will deploy the world's largest fault-tolerant network for
distributing Web content.
The company is Akamai Technologies Inc., and its network is designed to speed up the
delivery of richer Web pages. In doing so, it allows content producers with large audiences to
serve them reliably from servers located close to end-users.
In a Net world in which almost every product is touted as the next great thing, Akamai
nevertheless appears to be offering something with immense potential.
"This is the largest distributed network on the globe," said Paul Sagan, the company's new
chief operating officer. "And the secret (to why it will prosper) is in the sauce, meaning the
math.
"Some of the top math minds in the country have developed proprietary technology that will
change the way content is routed."
Akamai's proprietary network is based on patent-pending technology developed at MIT's
Laboratory for Computer Science. Frank Thomson Leighton, professor of applied
mathematics, developed many of the algorithms. Company spokesmen say he has left his
tenured post at MIT to serve as chief scientist at Akamai.
Other founders include vice presidents Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan, and chief
technology officer Daniel Lewin. Seelig previously worked with Israel-based ECI Telecom.
Kaplan, who will head the company's Los Angeles office, until recently was managing director
at SunAmerica. Lewin was a graduate student under Leighton.
Other members of Leighton's technology team include Bruce Maggs, a network architecture
professor who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, and David Karger, a professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
The company, which employs 30, has received more than $8 million in funding from Battery
Ventures in Wellesley, and Polaris Venture Partners of Boston and Seattle. As a result,
Akamai's board of directors includes Todd Dagres, general partner at Battery Ventures and
George Conrades, a partner at Polaris and former president of GTE Internetworking and
former chairman of BBN.
Company officials say they are beta-testing the flagship product, FreeFlow, in partnerships
with several large (and undisclosed) websites. Its beta test began this month with a deployment
of hundreds of proprietary distribution servers.
Company officials are circumspect about describing the technology, as it is patent pending.
However, the creation of the network is designed to move content closer to the end user.
"Websites won't be doing the heavy lifting of distributing content," said Sagan, whose
experience includes a stint as president of new media for Time Inc. in New York. "The
network will do that.
"The result is that sites can offer richer content and more dynamic pages, without feeling the
stress."
Officials say clients will be anyone from a major portal like Yahoo to the smallest company on
the Fortune 1000. They would pay Akamai for the right to connect to the network. The price
structure has not been disclosed. The technology will be on the market by late spring.
After three years of researching and developing the product, Leighton feels it is ready to make
a major impact.
Leighton said in a statement, "Our technology is revolutionary in terms of its ability to
distribute and manage content over a large network, without disrupting the content provider's
direct relationship with the end user.
"It promises to be a boon for a wide variety of Internet entertainment and information
providers as well as many e-commerce and on-line trading businesses."
The word "akamai" is Hawaiian for intelligent, clever and cool. These informal terms aren't
words that a math careerist like Leighton might regularly use, but for the moment they seem to
characterize the aura of promise that surrounds the product.
News or information from Mass High Tech may not be published, broadcast, or redistributed without the prior written
authorization of Mass High Tech. (c) Copyright MassTech Communications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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April 26, 1999
Web-Page Distribution System Could
Unclog Internet Traffic Jams
By ANDREW POLLACK
OS ANGELES -- Tax time was crunch time for the World Wide
Web site of Intuit Inc., the supplier of personal finance software.
Traffic shot up to as much as 20 times its levels the rest of year, as
customers downloaded the latest revisions to Intuit's Turbotax tax
preparation program.
But unlike tax seasons past, this time Intuit had the help of Sandpiper
Networks Inc., a start-up company that has developed a way to speed
the delivery of information on the Web. "Customers got it faster than they
would have with us," said Rick Parkinson, director of the planning and
delivery group at Intuit.
Sandpiper and a rival start-up
company, Akamai Technologies
Inc., are pioneering a way to
distribute material over the
Internet that avoids much of the
congestion that can turn the
World Wide Web into the
World Wide Wait. And the
companies are starting to be
noticed.
This week, Sandpiper is
expected to announce that
America Online, the largest provider of Internet access, has made a small
investment in the company and will incorporate Sandpiper's technology
into its network.
Inktomi Corp., a supplier of Internet software is expected to invest in the
start-up company along with two Sandpiper customers -- the Times
Mirror Corporation and NBC.
Sandpiper is raising a total of $21.5 million in this, its second round of
raising venture capital, with each of the corporate partners believed to be
putting in $2 million to $3 million and the rest coming from venture
capitalists.
Akamai, meanwhile, recently scored a coup of its own, hiring as its
president and chief executive George H. Conrades, formerly president of
the GTE Corporation's BBN unit and before that a top executive at
I.B.M.
As more corporations turn to the Web for marketing and sales, long
waits on the Internet are becoming bad for business. And while the
companies can improve service somewhat by buying more powerful
computers for their Web sites, they have less control over the network
traffic jams that can develop between their sites and the users.
"Since nobody controls the Internet, how do you insure quality of
service?" said Scott Yara, vice president for marketing at Sandpiper,
which is based in Westlake Village, Calif., outside of Los Angeles.
The answer proposed by both Sandpiper and Akamai is to distribute the
contents of a Web site to server computers dispersed throughout the
Internet, so that information does not always have to wend its way
through the network from a single site.
"The whole name of the game here is to push content to the edge of the
Internet, very, very close to the end user," said David Goodtree, vice
president for marketing at Akamai, which is based in Cambridge, Mass.
One use of such a service would be to help with big Web events that
could bring the Internet to its knees. The Los Angeles Times, owned by
Times Mirror, used Sandpiper to help cope with the on-line demand for
the Starr Report last year and for the newspaper's coverage of the
Academy Awards in March.
But Sandpiper and Akamai contend, and some analysts agree, that
distribution of Web content will eventually be a full-time necessity, as
Internet traffic continues to grow.
"The demand is so high and straightforward," said Ted Julian, an analyst
with Forrester Research, a market research firm in Cambridge.
A somewhat similar technique, known as caching, is already in use. If, for
example, an Internet service provider in Los Angeles finds heavy demand
among its customers for a Web page based in New York, it will create a
local copy of the page in Los Angeles.
But the actual producer of the Web page in New York has no control
over this cache, and thus no way of preventing the information on it from
becoming outdated. Moreover, the producer of the Web page usually
does not know how many visits or "hits" the copy on the cache receives.
Both Sandpiper and Akamai sell their service directly to the Web content
providers, automatically distributing the content to servers, updating the
material as necessary and keeping track of the number of visitors.
Sandpiper was founded three years ago by David Farber and Andrew
D. Swart, software experts who had worked for Interactive Systems, a
Unix company. Leo S. Spiegel, whom they recruited to be president,
started a computer company while still in college. That company, LAN
Systems, was sold to the Intel Corporation and R. R. Donnelly & Sons.
Akamai, which says its name means "intelligent, clever and cool" in
Hawaiian, grew out of a math class at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Tim Berners-Lee, the M.I.T. researcher known as the father of the Web,
suggested to Tom Leighton, a professor of applied mathematics, that
"load balancing" on the Internet would be a good problem for his class to
tackle. The classwork led to algorithms that are used by Akamai, which
was founded by Professor Leighton and a graduate student, Danny
Lewin.
Akamai, which is only now beginning commercial service, says that
customers for its trial service included 5 of the 10 most popular Web
sites. But Goodtree would not identify any of them.
Akamai seems to have a more sophisticated approach, but Sandpiper
has the advantage of being first, said Peter Christy, principal at
Collaborative Research, a market research firm in Los Altos, Calif.
Akamai also has deployed 400 servers, compared with only 32 for
Sandpiper. "We could handle the load today of 15 Yahoos and the top
20 Web sites combined," Goodtree said.
But the deal with America Online and Inktomi could help change that.
Inktomi already provides more than 300 cache servers to America
Online, and Sandpiper will now be able to use those, as well as Inktomi
servers in other networks. "It really expands our footprint," Spiegel said
of Sandpiper (which calls its service Footprint).
The biggest challenge for the companies, though, might not be each other
but new entrants expected in the market.
Julian of Forrester said these could include big computer service
providers like I.B.M. and Electronic Data Systems as well as companies
like Exodus Communications that provide computer sites used to host
Web pages. Even Intel announced last week that it would enter the
business of providing servers to host Web pages. But some of these
companies might decide to ally themselves with Sandpiper or Akamai
rather than compete with them.
Another challenge could be persuading companies to entrust distribution
of Web pages to outsiders.
Parkinson of Intuit, for instance, said it made sense to use Sandpiper to
save Intuit from having to invest in enough capacity to handle the rare
peak demand. But at times of normal demand, Intuit prefers to run its
Web site by itself, to guard its competitive information. "You give up a
little bit of control every time you give something to someone else," he
said.
Lemont Southworth, technology manager for latimes.com, said another
problem was that Sandpiper's system cannot handle the individually
customized advertisements that many Web sites offer.
Another possible threat is that if technologies like high-speed cable
modems and optical fiber can sufficiently reduce congestion, there would
be less need to store Web pages close to users.
But both companies insist that cable modems, by increasing the flow of
information between users' computers and Internet sites, will only
increase the strain on Web site providers, much as widening freeway
on-ramps can worsen congestion on the freeway itself.
So content will still need to be dispersed.
"I really believe it's the next evolution of the Internet," Spiegel said.
Related Sites
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Intuit Inc.
Sandpiper Networks Inc.
Akamai Technologies Inc.
America Online
Inktomi Corp.
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