The trick? Use cash to get cache and other goodies.
You know the symptoms: faces locked in zombielike trances, eyes glazed, fingers strumming away to a soundless beat. Those are the physical effects of the dreaded worldwide wait.
The worldwide wait also can suck up some serious green. Consumers start rejecting e-tail sites after just fifteen seconds of waiting for the initial page to load. News and information sitesâ€"from CNN to Rolling Stoneâ€"know a slow news-access day means lower click-through rates and lower advertising revenue. Even within the corporate house, jamming up crucial intranet applications will cut productivity and profits.
The name of the game is content delivery, dishing out Web pages that range from HR manuals, to Amazon.com specials, to Star Wars trailers. The content could play over the corporate network or to any way station in one of 180-plus connected countries. The players are just about anyone: resellers, integrators, xSPs or corporate partner managers.
Major contenders in the content delivery game are F5 Networks, Akamai Technologies and Inktomi. F5 makes hardware appliances and software. Akamai is a service provider. And Inktomi's Traffic Server is available for a variety of platforms. Although they offer different products, each tackles the same Web-wait-related problems.
