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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (48606)	12/21/1999 12:26:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 108040

AKAM.... AKAMAI EASES TRAFFIC JAMS ON THE SUPERHIGHWAY by Jim Thompson The hottest buzz in the Web caching market centers around a new company called Akamai Technologies. Akamai (pronounced AH kuh my) hit the headlines when Cisco dropped $49 million into the company. Not long after that, Akamai filed an IPO. The result was a fire storm of news and an overwhelming interest in the technology and the potential it offers for unclogging traffic on the Web. Although there is still debate over the merits of caching technology, there is no doubting the popularity of Web caching. The total size of the caching market for 1999 is projected to be $287 million, and that figure is expected to rise to $2.2 billion by 2002, according to the Internet Research Group (www.caching.com). The rush to share in the wealth has resulted in many new types of caching products. Just a year ago, caching fell into three basic categories, proxy, reverse proxy and transparent. Today, there are more than a dozen variations including ISP data center caching, streaming media caching and enterprise campus caching. Additionally, there are cache augmentation services from companies such as iBEAM Broadcasting and SkyCache and a new breed of caching called content distribution services from companies such as Akamai Technologies, CyberStar and Sandpiper Networks. SERVERS AROUND THE WORLD Akamai Technologies? FreeFlow is the most intriguing, and, by some accounts, the most promising of the caches. Akamai (in Hawaiian it means intelligent, but is colloquially used to mean cool) has built a network that, at the time this article was written, was comprised of about 900 servers on 25 networks in 15 countries. The company says it is adding more servers all the time. These servers, which have lots of DRAM and large disks, sit on the edges of the Internet and serve content when requested. Content providers make a deal with Akamai to place their material on the Akamai servers. Companies using Akamai?s FreeFlow include Yahoo!, CNN Interactive, ESPN.com, The New York Times, Go Networks and About.com. FreeFlow uses some very sophisticated algorithms developed by MIT researchers, led by Frank Thomson Leighton, former professor of applied mathematics, and now Akamai?s chief scientist. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------