Kiwi company's faster-web software quickly winning global interest

Photo / Herald on Sunday

A Wellington company has developed software which promises to speed web page download times by up to 75 per cent.

Enhancing the speed of a website is something the likes of Amazon.com have a team of staff working on, but software company Aptimize have come up with a tool to do it automatically.

Aptimize chief executive Ed Robinson said idea for the product came several years ago when testing the website for a software-as-a-service product.

A month before launch, Robinson emailed friends around the world asking them to test the site.

"They all came back and said 'It's really, really slow', in fact that's the only thing they said and you had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's like being told you had bad BO," said Robinson.

From his office in Wellington the site worked well and Robinson couldn't accept the problem was solely about slow broadband speeds.

"We did some more investigation and found out that the problem that we had was actually the same as so many other modern websites," he said. "They are really, really slow."

Robinson said the issue relates not to the size of the broadband "pipes" but the number of "trips" made from a web browser to a server to get the information to build up a web page.

The Aptimize Runtime Page Optimizer software developed by Robinson's company solves the problem by taking all the elements making up a web page and automatically turns them into several larger files.

Robinson said load times for pages hosted in New Zealand being viewed in New York dropped from 30 seconds down to 4 seconds.

Interest in the software has come from corporates running big intranet sites, e-commerce companies and technology companies advising clients on website performance.

New Zealand customers include Trade Me sites Old Friends and Find Someone, Turners Car Auctions, FlyBuys and Mainfreight.

In the next month two of the UK's top 20 websites - www.moneysupermarket. com and riverisland.com - will become customers, joining pharmaceutical giant Reckitt Benckiser and Microsoft.

"We're starting to get some really good signature customers using it so it's a really exciting times for us as a company," said Robinson.

Patrick Kouwenhoven, Gen-i's head of software solutions, oversaw the use of Aptimize for client Turners Car Auctions.

The Turners website needed to quickly display images of thousands of cars all at once but it was causing a server caching problem.

"I think this product is unique. We were struggling to find an alternative solution or product out in the market," said Kouwenhoven. "I don't know of anything else in the market that does what it does."

* www.aptimize.com