INDUSTRY LEADERS PROMOTE SPECIFICATION FOR DYNAMIC ASSEMBLY OF WEB APPLICATIONS AND CONTENT

Akamai, ATG, BEA Systems, Circadence, Digital Island, Fort Point Partners, IBM, Interwoven, , Macromedia, Mirror Image, Open Market, Oracle, SilverStream, and Vignette promote Edge Side Includes (ESI) as open specification

NEW YORK, NY - May 15, 2001 - Leaders in the Application Server, Content Infrastructure, Content Management, Technology Strategy and Integration, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) industries announced today their support for Edge Side Includes (ESI), a simple markup language used to define Web page fragments for dynamic assembly and delivery of Web applications at the network edge.

Unique to ESI is a mechanism for managing content transparently across Application Server solutions, Content Infrastructure, Content Management Systems and CDNs. As a result, ESI enables companies to develop Web applications once and choose at deployment time where the application should be assembled - on the application server, the content infrastructure, the content management system or the content delivery network, thus reducing complexity, development time and deployment costs.

Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM), ATG (Nasdaq: ARTG), BEA Systems (Nasdaq: BEAS), Circadence, Digital Island (Nasdaq: ISLD), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Interwoven (Nasdaq: IWOV), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), and Vignette (Nasdaq: VIGN) have co-authored the specification as a proposed open language for creating a uniform programming model that facilitates interoperability of ESI-compliant applications across multiple vendor implementations. In addition, Fort Point Partners, , Macromedia, Mirror Image, Open Market, and SilverStream have endorsed ESI as a proposed specification to provide more flexible and cost-effective solutions to their customers.

"The delivery of dynamic content from the edge of the network is one of the more difficult technological challenges," said Rob Batchelder, Research Director at Gartner. "It is essential that businesses have the ability to move database and application logic from centralized data centers to distribution points closer to their end users. When they can, businesses will begin to more fully realize performance improvements, bandwidth savings and increased efficiencies."

"We support the development of an open specification that will enable the application server, content management server and content delivery technologies we use to integrate seamlessly, enhancing the total performance of truly dynamic Web pages and applications from the edge of the Internet," said Joe Seibert, CIO at Viacom. "ESI will simplify how we create and operate our websites, and will make it easier to reduce our infrastructure costs while our customers enjoy the fastest and most reliable delivery of dynamic content and applications running on our website."

Guide to Retail Web Site Design & Usability

"The industry is ready for the adoption of a uniform method to express, assemble, and invalidate cacheable and non-cacheable elements of a Web site," said Marty Boos, Chief Architect and Vice President of Information Systems at Digital River. "The introduction of a common, simple markup language that allows developers to build Web pages and applications in HTML fragments that can then be dynamically assembled into complete, personalized pages, makes it easier for us to create and manage our 9,000 Web sites and improve the experience for our customers. This technology will enable Digital River to cache static and dynamic content either locally or remotely on the edge of the Internet."

"Our goal is to continue to extend the richness and functionality of our site while ensuring the highest levels of performance," said Eric Schvimmer, vice president of technology at Washingtonpost.com. "That requires being able to deliver dynamic Web content in a reliable manner, while also maximizing the efficiency by which constantly changing and personalized content reaches our end users. We are in support of an open specification that enables application server infrastructure and content delivery capabilities to interoperate for, not only a good user experience, but reduced total cost of ownership."

For more information on ESI, including a draft of the specification, an ESI Overview and technical documents, please visit www.edge-delivery.org

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