What are you gonna do when customers won’t wait 4 seconds? Speed up the delivery

With four tiers on the Internet, it is possible to accelerate web content on all levels. Those levels are: the server where information enters the Internet from a web-site host, the network which transports the information, the edge server which distributes the information to ISPs and the user which allows the end user to download the information (see chart and accompanying story). A consensus has not emerged on which level to accelerate, although Akamai Technologies Inc.’s name is becoming slang for content acceleration, as in the “Akamaizing” of content.

In fact, accelerating content at any or all of those points may make sense as retailers try to meet different needs. Victoria’s Secret and Tower Records, for instance, need to reach a global audience and so chose technology that moved the content closer to potential customers via a global network of servers. Art.com needs to allow customers quick access to data-heavy graphic art images, so it chose a technology that anticipates consumers’ next wishes. And Neiman Marcus needs high-quality graphics to show its high-quality goods, so it chose a compression solution. “Retailers considering this technology have to know what they need to have accelerated, whether it’s static or dynamic, rich in graphics or changes on a regular basis,” says Glenn Cruickshank, senior manager in the digital content management practice at KPMG Consulting Inc.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai, which has more than 3,000 clients—including retailers—using its content acceleration technology, addresses the first three of four potential bottlenecks on the Internet. Akamai operates more than 8,000 servers as part of 473 networks in 55 countries. Akamai takes popular material from its clients’ servers and stores it on the servers on its network. With this system, downloaded information resides as close to a user as possible, instead of taking multiple trips from the web origin to the end user. Clients subscribe to the service based on content delivered in megabits per second, typically paying a monthly fee.

Akamai accelerates content by using advanced mathematical routing algorithms to find the fastest route through all three bottleneck areas of the Internet. The system runs checks every two to three seconds in a localized region; every two to ten minutes it produces a map of the Internet. “We can see changes in traffic patterns and route content around it,” says Andrew Lickly, Akamai product marketing manager.

The company also works with other content acceleration specialists such as Cacheflow and Volera to address specific areas on the Internet. Cacheflow, for example, specializes in providing additional hardware for cache space on Internet servers in the first mile, or server side connection, says Lickly. Volera specializes in streaming media and dynamic content caching.

By moving the Victoria’s Secret content to Akamai servers worldwide, the retailer had room on its own server to take more requests and, eventually, make more sales. “We can improve content delivery speed from two to 10 times, which frees up a web site’s resources so their infrastructure can process more people and transactions,” says Lickly.

Akamai also has improved operations for TicketMaster.com as well as Tower Records. Akamai says Tower Records earned a 200% return on its content acceleration investment in the first year. Tower Records experienced immediate sales increase of 6%, cut bandwidth costs by 50%, saved $2 million on data centers and reduced page download time from 8 seconds to less than 2, Akamai says.

While Akamai focuses on speeding movement through the first three tiers of the Internet, others focus on the fourth tier—or last mile. California-based Fireclick, for instance, speeds up the connection between the ISP and the end user by preloading web content for the user so it shows up on the user’s screen faster than if the user had to wait for an individually chosen connection. The theory behind the technology is that if an end user has a slow modem, all the content acceleration will not improve the download time. Therefore, all efforts to speed up content downloading in the other three tiers within the server, networks and ISP are futile.

Fireclick’s strategy is to stay one step ahead of the user: “What we figured out is this technology called predictive caching,” says Steve O’Brien, vice president of marketing. “We’re using the cache in the end user’s browser to preload what we think the user will download next.” Using predictive algorithm models, which the company builds by keeping statistics on web page requests, Fireclick’s products understand what a user will likely download next, then store it in advance in the user’s own browser cache. It takes about a week to build a predictive model. This way the end user experiences a faster connection regardless of the bandwidth connection, says O’Brien.

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Another emerging player in the fourth tier/last mile segment of content acceleration is RichFX, whose technology compresses graphic files using proprietary algorithm software. “The difference between what we do and what other content acceleration vendors like Akamai do is that they make the pipes bigger and we compress the liquid that flows through them,” says John Mellor, vice president of product management at RichFX. Several high-end retailers are using RichFX’s technology to display more detailed web content, including Neiman Marcus, Coach and Museum Shop.

Neiman Marcus uses RichFX to sell Manolo Blahnik shoes online. These expensive shoes are famous for their artistic designs. Presenting them accurately and in great detail online is an important selling point. “We use algorithms based on 3-D graphics to compress the files to serve the lowest common denominator—-an end user with a dial-up modem,” says Mellor. The software allows a consumer without highly sophisticated technology to view the item in three dimensions and to quickly pan to inspect different angles or styles of the product. “This gives online retailers the power to show their merchandise to the consumer almost the same way they can in a real store, by allowing them to quickly inspect the grain on a leather purse or see the intricate details of a shoe design. And this is easily viewed from a 56.6k modem,” says Mellor.

While retailers have mostly opted for different approaches to accelerating content, many are beginning to realize they may need to enlist more than one solution to improve download time. Sage says using different types of acceleration technology is paramount for online retailers to remain competitive. “To keep up with everyone else you need a toolkit that covers a broad range of things. Having services like Akamai and Fireclick is part of that,” he says. “You’re going to see more of these technologies if online retailers are to remain viable.”

andrea@verticalwebmedia.com

Vendors focus on what they call the four tiers of the Internet. Their approaches fix different areas, from how web information gets to the network to bottlenecks among the servers to making files easier for the consumer to download. The four tiers are:

Few vendors in content acceleration work alone. They acknowledge that content can be speeded up in all areas. And because the Internet is by its own nature extensive and complex, there is potentially a market for improvements at every turn.

A few vendors provide acceleration services in more than one of the four tiers. Companies like Exodus, which hosts company web sites and handles the technical infrastructures on which they operate, work to make the pipe through which information travels bigger. They use cache technologies in tiers 1, 2, and 3 to accelerate content on the server side where information comes onto the net, network accelerators to move information across the Net faster and edge accelerators to distribute content to users through their ISPs. Exodus has three different products that a client can use all together or individually, which address Tiers 1, 2 and 3. Akamai also provides acceleration in tiers 1, 2 and 3 and has a partnership with Fireclick to provide tier 4 support. Exodus, which supports 4,500 clients, did not disclose the number of retailers who actually use its content acceleration services.

In tier 2, the network acceleration area, where content is actually moved through various servers over the Internet, Exodus with Mirror Image as a partner, Akamai and Digital Island all provide services that speed the flow of information. Tier 3, which distributes content so end users can get content from a server that is closer than where the content originates, is covered by Exodus, Akamai as well as Inktomi. For example, a consumer in Australia can download content from a European web site without waiting for the information to travel from Europe, where the site is hosted, through the Internet and to the consumer’s local ISP.

These service providers also may partner with another vendor to tweak a small part of that process, such as adding cache hardware to increase storage capacity to avoid back ups on a local server. Caching is a storage mechanism that maintains downloaded information so it is easier to find once it is downloaded. A cache on a personal computer, for example, would hold the most recent web downloads, making it faster to access if the user types in the same web page in the future. Many companies, such as Volera, Network Appliance, Stratacache, SpiderCache and Cacheflow specialize in caching and often work with other network and server vendors.