Inktomi , in hopes of trying to recapture some of its success in the caching software market in the U.S., is now setting its sights on the growing
Asia-Pacific market with an announced deal Monday to Fujitsu’s Web server
division.
The popular American caching software developers, who have an A-list of
clients that range from Compaq
to AOL Time Warner
to Digital
Island, have been one of a small number of tech companies in the U.S.
to weather the recession that’s hit the U.S. this past year.
But what do you do when your customers are going out of business or
severely cutting back deployment of Web caching servers to content
providers? Inktomi’s answer seems to be go somewhere else.
Masahiro Kawakatsu, Fujitsu Limited group senior vice president of personal
systems business group, said the growing demand for Web caching in Japan
led to the marriage of Inktomi’s caching software and Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY
edge servers.
“The growth of broadband and rich media creates the need for faster, more
intelligent networks,” he said. “Fujitsu’s high- performance,
high-reliability PRIMERGY servers in conjunction with Inktomi’s
industry-leading network software, delivers a best-in-class solution for
content delivery.”
The Asian-Pacific region is quickly becoming a hotspot for broadband
Internet connectivity. Japan and S. Korea are experiencing a large number
of high-speed converts and corporations and service providers are
scrambling to catch up with the demand.
Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY servers are designed to improve digital subscriber line
(DSL) connections, putting “edge” servers on the network, dramatically
speeding up the time it takes the end user to download content from
far-flung Web sites.
The Asia-Pacific Research Group predicts that IT spending on Web
initiatives, a meager eight percent in 2000, will more than double to 19
percent by the end of 2003. This growth, analysts say, will be spurred
mainly by growth from banks, insurance companies and government agencies
looking to bolster their sites and improve e-commerce services.
But other analysts in the region point to a growing demand for residential
broadband connections and expect 500 percent growth by 2005 to 25 million
DSL and cable Internet users. There is likely not enough copper and fiber
optic cable in the county to adequately serve all these incoming customers,
so edge servers will play an increasing role with service providers and
carriers.
Fujitsu, and Inktomi by extension, are clearly looking to gain early entry
into these institutions, and are poised to take the Japanese market by
storm. Fujitsu’s caching servers are the first in the industry to provide
gigabit Ethernet card support in a 1U form factor, dramatically shrinking
the server space required for that amount of speed. Most gigabit cards are
2U in size.
In November, Inktomi penned a deal with Japanese content provider (think
Yahoo! or Excite) AII, Inc. The deal gave the company faster connections
and freed up a considerable portion of their network to service its 60
cable Internet service providers (ISP) customers.
