Campbell, Calif.’s FineGround Networks Inc., a firm devoted to content acceleration for the enterprise, Monday will unleash the
latest version of its flagship Condenser software product.
With an emphasis on delivering dynamic, or “live” Internet content 10 times faster than normal deliveries and reducing bandwidth by
95 percent to help customers cut costs, Condenser 3.0 is praised by analysts for its Delta Optimization feature, which sends only
the changes in a page are sent from the enterprise to the end-user. That is how FineGround goes about addressing the “last-mile”
issue that so many content delivery players are trying to solve; customers looking to offer consumers e-business transactions, stock
quotes, personalized content, and news media content can benefit from this.
Evan Quinn, chief analyst of Hurwitz Group, said that while Web servers and simple server-side caches were never designed to handle
the volume and complexity of content associated with modern Web-based applications, Condenser “redefines content delivery for the
enterprise by intelligently speeding embedded objects as well a wide variety of content types in a non-invasive manner.”
How is version 3.0 different from the previous two versions? It boasts a new capability called FlashForward Object Acceleratio,
which attempts to speed the delivery of embedded objects such as graphic images and style sheets. FlashForward reduces upstream and
downstream network traffic to offer users a more immediate experience.
Nat Kausik, CEO of FineGround Networks, said fast response over the Internet is a key competitive advantage. The key attraction with
Condenser, he said, is that customers can cut their network expenses, thus achieving a return on
investment in a few months.
And what of the customers? FineGround, which sells Condenser at a base price of $50,000 that goes up depending how many central
processing units (CPUs) need to be served, has sold career service giant Monster.com Inc. and appliance titan Whirlpool Corp. on its
upgraded product for their Internet and intranet services, respectively.
FineGround may be a smaller company in the content delivery space when you put them next to the Akamai’s, or Digital Island’s,
Inktomi’s and CacheFlow, but it’s product is more complementary than competitive with those firms, whose technologies are
cache-based.
First, Akamai and Digital Island provide content delivery services. Inktomi and CacheFlow provide caching products, but none of the
firms address the last mile (Akamai’s EdgeSuite, as you can guess, sits at the edge). But the most important distinction is that
those firms mostly address static content — content that does not change, as opposed to dynamic, or live content that is altered on
the fly.
