Intel Introduces Family of E-business Communications Products and Services - Intel NetStructure network switch - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 21, 2000

Targeting businesses that are rapidly evolving into e-Businesses, Intel Corporation Wednesday unveiled a family of communications products and services that improve e-Commerce transactions through faster online connections, security authentication and server response time. At the Intel Developer Forum Wednesday, the company also announced it is creating the Intel NetStructure brand name and launching a multi-million dollar marketing campaign to promote Intel's communication focus and products.

The products within the Intel NetStructure family target a new category of value-added infrastructure appliances and networking communications equipment for building or improving e-Businesses and helping them operate more efficiently. Focused on helping e-Businesses generate more revenue in less time, the products are designed to be easily deployed and complement companies' existing network and server environment improving server performance by as much as 150 times. The products also provide increased server responsiveness and reliability by acting as "traffic cops" that can both intelligently assign data and identify -- and avoid -- server errors and down time.

The seven products introduced Wednesday include a new Internet caching appliance for faster access to heavily-requested Web pages. Other products include e-Commerce load balancing equipment, designed to more evenly spread Internet traffic among available servers and improve server performance; security authentication "accelerators" that quicken vital online user identification checks; and high speed switches for rapid transmission of data. Intel will also target the growing variety of e-Business service providers or "xSPs" both as direct Intel customers and as resellers of Intel NetStructure brand name products.

"Intel is looking to easily and affordably strengthen customers' e-Business infrastructure by providing value-added solutions that are easy to deploy and enhance the e-Commerce experience," said John Miner, vice president and general manager of Intel's Communications Products Division. "We will focus on delivering high-performance, best-in-class solutions and services to emerging e-Businesses."

In April, the company also plans to begin offering its Intel NetStructureSM Service Solutions, a comprehensive support center that will provide services and support for the entire Intel NetStructure product line. The services will be sold through Intel's sales channels and will include product installation and general hardware and software subscription support, parts repair and advanced part replacement.

Developed by Intel's Communications Products Group, the company has built upon its own leading e-Business experience, which currently averages more than $1 billion per month in online orders, as well as its unique expertise in servers, networking and communications to develop this new product family. Intel is also using Intel NetStructure products in its own e-Business environment.

"8 Second" Marketing Campaign

To support the new brand name and communications focus, Intel is also launching a multi-million dollar advertising campaign that focuses on e-Business themes such as "eight seconds." The concept reflects a recent Zona Research study(b) that indicates consumers will typically wait only eight seconds for a response before deserting a site or ending an online transaction, contributing to hundreds of millions of dollars lost in uncompleted online orders due to busy or down servers and e-Businesses. Businesses are increasingly concentrating on improving service and reducing customer frustration that can result from slow online response times.

The campaign will also focus on how industry standards-based, high-performance and adaptable e-Business infrastructure solutions from Intel provide a cost effective and easy way of building or enhancing e-Businesses.

Intel Netstructure Family

The seven communications products that currently make up the Intel NetStructure family include:

--Intel NetStructure(tm) Cache 1500: Internet Caching Appliance, designed with the Inktomi Traffic Server Engine(c) to enable fast, easy-to-deploy and manageable caching solutions that can significantly improve bandwidth utilization at lower costs than traditional caching solutions.

-- Intel NetStructure(tm) 7180 e-Commerce Director, the first device of its kind that combines security acceleration and application-aware traffic management to improve the speed of user authentication (Secure Socket Layer - SSL) transactions by up to 150 times(a). It also helps to eliminate user-viewed errors, and balance SSL traffic among servers based on specific URLs.

-- Intel NetStructure(tm) 7110 e-Commerce Accelerator, which boosts the speed of e-Commerce traffic by offloading the processing power needed by the server for secure Internet transactions. The accelerator can enhance server performance by up to 50 times.(a)

-- Intel NetStructure(tm) 7140 Traffic Director, an advanced Layer traffic management solution 4 (layers define a method for communication between devices, each focused on a set of special, related functions). This "traffic cop" analyzes real-time server responses to intelligently balance user load among companies' existing servers. This improves site performance, responsiveness and reliability.