Cashing in on cache market

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

From small beginnings last year, the market for internet caching - technology that speeds up the delivery of web content - looks ready to explode.

United States market research company Dataquest predicts the caching market, valued at $US100 million ($196 million) in 1999, will be worth $US3.6 billion by 2003.

CacheFlow's senior vice-president of sales, Alan Robin, is aiming to sell $A15 to $A22 million of equipment in Australia and New Zealand during 2000. The company is one of the pioneers of internet caching, but since it started shipping its first dedicated caching appliance in 1998 the market has become more crowded.

In New Zealand, the active companies in this field include appliance manufacturer Cobalt, and networking software company Novell, which offers its Internet Caching Services (ICS) software through Compaq, Dell, IBM and other manufacturers.

Intel has also announced caching products as part of its NetStructure appliance range and Auckland-based Trilogy Systems has become the New Zealand distributor of CacheFlow's arch-competitor, Network Appliance.

At present, Network Appliance caches are used in New Zealand by Voyager and another, unnamed, ISP.

Trilogy's Dave Adams, country manager for Network Appliance, said the company was targeting caching sales conservatively at $1 million over the next year and $3 million the following year.

CacheFlow boasts that its range of caching devices can speed up the delivery of internet content by up to 10 times and make bandwidth savings of around 35 per cent.


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Another trend which has recently developed is the practice of putting a cache in front of a farm of servers, on the user's side of the firewall. Mr Robin said the cache could store and quickly deliver non-secure objects such as welcome pages. The effect was to reduce the number of servers needed at any given installation by up to half.

While CacheFlow's customers in New Zealand have so far been limited to ISPs including Clear and Asia Online, regional director Neal Meharg said an airline and an insurance company were evaluating its products.

Mr Adams said corporate users in New Zealand had been slow to appreciate the benefits of caching.

However, he believed this would soon change as the country's geographical location meant the potential gains were bigger than the US.

"In the Australasian region bandwidth is constrained pretty much by satellite transmission times . . . whereas in the United States a web page can be transmitted [via cable] across the country in 10 to 15 milliseconds - here it takes 200 to 250 milliseconds for a page to arrive and that's on a relatively good day."

This creates a promising environment for Network Appliance's caching products that range from entry-level products of 4 to 5 megabits/s capacity (enough to run a medium-sized commercial website) to a telco grade 100 megabits/s.