German Firm Announces “Wash & Cache” Package

[June 9] German software developer
webwasher.com AG
claims that far from slowing down response times its
Web filtering system can speed them by up to 80 percent
if used with a new cache server.

The so-called “Wash & Cache” solution released in
Germany this week — and not yet available in the U.S. —
is a combination of the Primergy WebAccelerator from
Fujitsu Siemens and the WebWasher filter.

Dr. Horst Joepen, president and chief executive of webwasher.com
explained that Wash & Cache does away with a problem
that increasingly plagues the use of cache servers in
enterprise networks, namely the falling number of
bufferable Web pages in the cache.

“Caches are becoming increasingly strained by the
dynamics of Web pages built from databases,” said
Joepen, adding that Web developers now tend to use
evasion commands as a matter of course in order to
keep the displayed message current.

Wash & Cache is expected to solve the problem
by blocking cache evasions as well as performing
its normal function of suppressing advertising banners
and pop-up windows.

Werner Steinschmidt, director of server product
marketing, Fujitsu Siemens Germany, explained how
Siemens developed WebWasher software for content
filtering and access control in-house.

“Since then, efficient Web caching for our enterprise
clients has become increasingly important, leading
us to recommend WebWasher ad filtering software as
a technically sophisticated supplement to our
Primergy WebAccelerator,” said Steinschmidt.

Widespread use of ad filtering software is not,
however, welcomed by everyone — especially those
publishers who rely on income from advertising to
support their operations.

Nonetheless, webwasher.com AG plans to go ahead
with a U.S. launch, saying that savings of around
25 per cent of bandwidth makes the use of Wash & Cache
especially effective for Internet Service Providers.

Founded in October 1999, WebWasher.com AG is a spin-off
from Siemens Information and Communication Products.