Seattle Gets on the ApGen Fast Track

When WebGecko’s CTO John Crim recently hanged out at Askme.com’s headquarters for a full week, the question that he was probably asked most frequently is: “Is it quicker now?”

That’s because the CTO of the Seattle-based web development and software services company was on-site to deploy his company’s Active Page Generator (APGen) technology to speed up the performance of askme.com’s website.

In fact, many dotcoms are finding it more cost effective to deploy such technology as APGen versus installing additional web servers. “We estimate that we probably saved askme.com anywhere from $1.2 to $1.5 million in hardware costs,” says WebGecko Co-founder Jim Vanderslice.

And it wasn’t just money saved, it was also speed gained.

According to VP of Development at Askme.com Digvijay Chauhan, WebGecko’s APGen technology has helped many of the company’s site pages to be as much as 20 times faster.

According to Vanderslice, e-commerce sites use JSP and ASP that retrieve data at the time of request. However, because on most sites data is not updated all the time, it’s possible to retrieve data from static html pages vs the dynamic asp and jsp. “That’s what increases the website’s speed perfomance,” says Vanderslice.

“Companies need to realize that they are only as fast as their slowest piece.” Our goal is for our technology to allow for the fastest possible website on the web server. In fact, according to Vanderslice the company has a performance guarantee of at least three times faster. “That’s the minimum,” says Vanderslice.

The company’s ApGen technology is compatible with caching products offered by such companies as Akamai, Cacheflow, Inktomi and Network Appliance.

It is currently available online at www.webgecko.com. However, Vanderslice believes that on the long-term it will be made available via large solution providers. The company will soon be partnering with such companies as Microsoft Consulting and Arthur Anderson.