A new battle ground is forming around internet caching technology, according to a new report from Los Altos, California-based Collaborative Research. Internet caches store recently-requested web pages and deliver them more quickly to web users when they are requested again. But, says the report, they offer other less obvious benefits, ranging from the acceleration of existing web servers, to the replacement of cumbersome file mirroring schemes, and the speeding up of Internet browsers over dial-up modem connections. Currently the market is pretty much equally divided between Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp’s proxy server offerings and the freeware Unix offering, the Squid Internet Object Cache (http://squid.nlanr.net/Squid/). But things are changing. Caching products will serve two distinct markets, the authors of the report believe: internet service providers; and large end users. The market outside of the US will be the larger one, because of the higher rates of internet charges. The report identifies Cisco Systems Inc, file server vendor Network Appliance Corp, Intel Corp, Novell Inc, IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc as the significant market contenders of the future. Intel Corp has already entered the market with its own Quick Web offering (CI No 3,329), and also has a financial stake in Inktomi Corp. It is currently in the process of porting Inktomi’s Traffic Server network cache product to run on the Intel architecture and Windows NT from the current Sparc and Unix version (CI No 3,265). Network Appliance Corp acquired technology start-up Internet Middleware Corp in March 1997, and is preparing an NT version of the Unix-based Harvest web cache, from which Squid was also derived (CI No 3,123). Sun Microsystems has also packaged web caching technology in with its Netra web servers (CI No 3,308). And a set of new companies – the likes of Sweden’s Mirror Image Internet Inc (CI No 3,270) – are beginning to emerge. Collaborative anticipates a rapid growth, and revenue domination for appliance packages of cache, and says it sees internet caching as a valuable predictor for the market evolution of other Internet middleware products. It guesses the market will be worth $1bn by the year 2000, dominated by integrated hardware/software sales. ISP Adoption will take place before end users start taking an interest, from 1999. Further details, www.collaborativeresearch.com.
