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To: Ron Dior who wrote (8767)	4/28/1999 12:12:00 PM
From: Sleeper	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Looks like AOL is trying to cover ALL bases... Sleeper ------------------------------------------------ Sandpiper raises cash from new customers By Georgie Raik-Allen Red Herring Online April 28, 1999 Tired of waiting for big pipes and faster switches to speed up its network, America Online (NYSE: AOL) is turning to content delivery company Sandpiper Networks. At Hambrecht & Quist's Technology Conference on Tuesday, Sandpiper CEO Leo Spiegel announced that AOL was employing Sandpiper's delivery technology throughout its network. As part of the deal, AOL is also participating in a $21.5 million second round that includes Inktomi (Nasdaq: INKT), Eagle New Media Investment, Hambrecht & Quist, Bayview Investors, Attractor Investment Management, and prior investors Brentwood Venture Capital, Media Technology Ventures, and Mission Ventures. Another Sandpiper customer, NBC, is expected to announce next week that it is also participating in the round. Sandpiper's content delivery system, Footprint, improves Web site performance by delivering content from a globally distributed network of servers deployed with ISPs and major backbone providers. The technology intelligently avoids Internet congestion and serves content closer to end users. Customers such as the Los Angeles Times, E! Online, and Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) install Sandpiper's software at their Web sites, which routes file requests to the Footprint content distribution servers for delivery. MAKING FRIENDS Mr. Spiegel calls the funding round and deal with AOL a "validation of the content delivery network" as a solution to the problem of a congested and unreliable Internet which has so far failed provide the quality of service that online businesses online require and that consumers increasingly demand. Search engine and caching company Inktomi has also agreed to integrate its technology into the Footprint service. Inktomi already provides 300 cache servers to AOL; its end of the Sandpiper deal will significantly expand the Footprint network. Mr. Spiegel wants to sign more partnership deals during 1999 and to build up the network to more than 1,000 servers by the end of the year. "We always believed the solution to providing a speedier, less congested Internet would not be solved by a single company, but through partnerships and alliances," says Mr. Spiegel. Another startup is trying to solve the problem with a network of its own. Akamai Technologies is currently beta-testing its content delivery service FreeFlow, which also speeds up the delivery of Web pages through a network of servers located closer to end users. Sandpiper appears to have a first-to-market advantage in this space, but analysts say Akamai has developed sophisticated technology based on mathematical algorithms developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The startup has had its own share of media attention with the recently announced appointment of George H. Conrades, a veteran executive from IBM (NYSE: IBM) and former president of Internet service provider BBN, to the position of chairman and CEO. Akamai was launched earlier this year with $8 million venture funding by Battery Ventures and Polaris Venture Partners. CACHE OR CONTROL? Both startups are targeting Web publishers, who have been reluctant to use caching to speed up delivery of their content because it makes it difficult to keep the content fresh and updated and impossible to measure traffic statistics. According to Mr. Spiegel, "we're solving the old dilemma of cache versus control," because the company can measure a Web publisher's traffic as it moves through the Footprint servers. However, many Web publishers are hoping that growing deployment of cable modems and Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) will solve Web performance problems without the need to pay a subscription fee to Sandpiper or Akamai. Mr. Spiegel says that as Internet use continues to grow, and use of cable and DSL feeds the creation of bandwidth-intensive content such as streaming audio and video, demands on Web sites are going to increase rather than disappear. "It's like adding four lanes to Highway 101 -- it might be easier to get on, but the traffic on the highway will be even more congested," he says. Large companies like Exodus (Nasdaq: EXDS) and Frontier GlobalCenter are also trying to solve Web performance problems by hosting Web sites in their Internet data centers. Mr. Spiegel hopes those sites will want to partner rather than compete with Sandpiper, so that the combined forces can offer customers colocation of their servers in a bomb-proof, bullet-proof facility and faster content delivery from a single provider. If the services offered by large hosting companies are so complementary to Sandpiper's technology, one of them might hope to acquire the startup. Mr. Spiegel throws cold water on that idea. "Sandpiper is not for sale," he says. "We are going to take this company public."