Netli Accelerates Rich Internet Applications

Business Wire, Dec 13, 2006

Application Delivery Network Service Ensures Performance and Scale Demanded by Web 2.0 Applications

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Netli[R], the fastest growing global service provider for accelerating applications and content over the Internet, today detailed its support for accelerating rich Internet applications (RIAs) built using Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, Flex, and Web Services. Netli offers the only managed service to accelerate Web applications built on Web 2.0 technologies bi-directionally using Netli's optimize protocol and global Application Delivery Network, ensuring the rich desktop-like experience that is fundamental to the Web 2.0 paradigm. In a separate release today, Netli announced that Snap.com has selected Netli to ensure a fast, responsive user experience for its Web 2.0-based search engine (see release titled, "Snap.com selects Netli to accelerate award-winning Web 2.0 search engine," dated Dec. 13).

Popular RIA sites such as Google Maps, Flickr and Del.icio.us have encouraged enterprises to adopt Web 2.0 technologies in order to deliver global, web-based applications that mirror desktop applications. Gartner estimates that by 2010, at least 60 percent of new application development projects will include RIA technology. The downside of RIAs is that constant interaction between users and servers places a greater load on the data center infrastructure and uses more bandwidth than traditional applications, requiring optimization techniques beyond today's standard Internet acceleration appliances and content delivery network (CDN) services.

"With Web 2.0, websites and applications are no longer made up of standard HTML and static content. AJAX and Flex impose new requirements and demands on enterprises deploying these technologies," said Willie M. Tejada, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Netli. "Our solutions were designed from the ground up to accelerate and scale dynamic Web applications making optimization of these new applications straight forward for us and our customers."

Snap.com, a next-generation search engine application built using AJAX, provides a fluid browsing experience by pre-loading images and dynamically suggesting keywords and phrases as a user inputs a search term--resulting in constant traffic between the user and server. To ensure a fast, responsive user experience even in the face of network congestion, traffic spikes, and rapid company growth, Snap.com turned to Netli. The Netli service required no changes to the Snap.com application or infrastructure and was deployed over a weekend.

"The ability of Netli to scale on demand mitigates the impact of the increased server load of our Web 2.0-based application," said Mike Agostino, CTO of Snap.com. "After implementing Netli, we saw a 59 percent speed improvement on our homepage and a 30 to 50 percent speed improvement on our search result pages. This ability to consistently and globally deliver a desktop-like user experience encourages adoption and helps us generate increased advertising revenue."

Fundamental to the Web 2.0 paradigm is the bi-directional relationship between the user and server where new pages are built based on a series of user interactions, rather than a single page request. The NetliOne platform uses several optimization techniques to accelerate these interactions and deliver the performance and scale RIAs require, including optimizing JavaScript and flash execution, intelligently pre-fetching and loading content at the edge to reduce total page-load time, TCP connection management, optimized HTTP requests, and compression. Additional optimizations that help accelerate Web 2.0 applications include caching of frequently requested objects to reduce server utilization and reduce page response time for cacheable content; bi-directional acceleration of HTTP and HTTPS (SSL-encrypted) content to ensure LAN-like response times for ongoing intermediate interactions between the user and server; and congestion and packet-loss mitigation to support reliable and consistent LAN-like response times.

The NetliOne Platform serves as the foundation for the Netli Application Delivery Network (ADN) suite of services: NetLightning[R], NetliOffload[TM], NetliContinuity[TM], NetliView[TM], NetliDRM[TM], and Netli Accelerated SSL Delivery. NetLightning securely accelerates dynamic, enterprise Web applications to assure LAN-like response times worldwide without requiring application modifications. With zero cache warming and management required, NetliOffload offloads static content delivery to shift bandwidth, computing, and storage requirements from the enterprise data center to the on-demand Netli network infrastructure. NetliContinuity provides global traffic management to ensure optimal performance and availability across data centers. NetliView continuously monitors business-critical, Netli-optimized applications to provide visibility into application response time and health. NetliDRM provides accelerated access to and control over high-value digital assets. Netli Accelerated SSL Delivery ensures LAN-like response times worldwide for secure traffic.