By William Fellows
With web-caching set to become a cash cow, Sunnyvale, California- based CacheFlow Inc is gearing up for an IPO within the next 12 months. It claims to be almost profitable and to have a backlog of orders for its low-cost web caching appliances. But the 100- person company is also keen to inject some realism into the market which has Cisco Systems, Network Appliance and red-hot stock Inktomi as its lead players. CacheFlow is targeting enterprises in the hope that they will spend more money on its web caching systems than the ISPs and carriers that currently make up 90% of its revenues. In 1999 it expects to do 40% of its revenues in the enterprise. In large part that’s because tomorrow’s corporate IT departments are going to look a lot like today’s ISPs. It says that in its latest deal, Xerox Corp, Xerox will save $400,000 by throwing out 25 Sun Microsystems Inc proxy servers in favor of 12 CacheFlow boxes. It argues that neither Inktomi nor Network Appliance service enterprises because they both focus on backbone and large regional providers. It is still not sure about Cisco. CacheFlow systems are priced between $9,000 and $30,000 compared with Cisco’s $15,000, Inktomi’s $95,000-plus and Network Appliance’s $22,000 to $100,000 tags. CacheFlow believes a new network layer is being spawned where data, in this case frequently-accessed web pages, is going to be put much closer to users – on appliances like its own – and that the network itself becomes almost ‘state’ as a result. CacheFlow says it offers a fundamentally different kind of value proposition to its competitors which it notes are based on the Squid web-caching system that grew out of US government-funded ARPA and university projects. CacheFlow says its CacheOS and services are designed to accelerate the internet. The 3Mb operating system stores everything as objects and requires only one I/O operation to get data in and out, unlike a conventional file system. Its probability algorithms assess the likelihood of pages changing and determine the cheapest pipeline retrieval paths, such as deleting the page that can be reloaded the fastest, not necessarily the one accessed most infrequently. It says it also provides adaptive refreshing of pages whereas Squid systems simply compare pages with originals. Proxy servers such as Netscape added caching as an afterthought, CacheFlow maintains. It’s looking to emulate Cisco’s business and product model and already has Compaq Computer Corp selling its router-like devices. It claims @Home Networks has inherited a highly a Squid-oriented engineering crowd that has eyes only for Inktomi even though Inktomi effectively provides a separate layer over multiple systems and is gradually bloating its services with searching, shopping and other features on top of caching. Server vendors, CacheFlow observes, love the CPU-intensive Inktomi, whereas CacheFlow maintains that caching is not inherently a CPU- intensive task.
