What companies like Appcelerator, Cotendo and Urban Airship–which all work with web developers to speed delivery of content to consumers–really worry about is the growing fragmentation of the software stack they work with as well as potentially hobbling patent litigation.

“Fragmentation is occurring at every layer for the stack–at the tools level, at the clouds themselves, the carriers and everything in between,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, speaking at the Mobilize 2011 conference on Monday.

Another, related issue, is the rise in IP litigation which makes nearly everyone nervous, said Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. ”The lawyers are killing it, and it’s a bummer because it’s stifling innovation.”

Patent battles are raging around the industry with Oracle’s ongoing litigation against Google for its use of Java in Android, as a high-profile example.

Perhaps more mundane a problem is the age-old issue of latency.

As more people demand richer and more dynamic content, there’s a technology challenge, said Shlomi Gian, GM mobile services for Cotendo. “As content gets more dynamic and less cacheable, we still want it fast. We want it as fast as our desktop. today it takes 10 to 12 seconds to load a page. That gap is an opportunity,” Gian said.

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The state of web content today

As richer, more dynamic, more interactive sites have hit the Web; the existing infrastructure has become insufficient. While high-speed broadband has tried to meet the infrastructure demands of the exploding volume and size of content on the Web, it’s clear that throwing pure infrastructure at the problem isn’t enough.

Two new markets emerged from these challenges: the content delivery network market (CDN) and the application delivery controller market (ADC). Put simply: These are technologies that help make your experience on the web a lot faster, while still using the same infrastructure that has been in place for the past two decades.

Remarkably, those two markets are now struggling to keep up with the explosive growth of the web. Sites are too big, too dynamic, and too rich for our existing infrastructure, and prevailing techniques for optimizing performance.

Today, we’re embarking upon the third major evolution in modern web performance. Web content optimization and acceleration is one of the largest market opportunities in the tech sector today, and it’s going to pave the way for the next major era of the Internet. Without it, innovation gets throttled.

The technologies we’re currently using to speed up the web need to be supercharged. They need extra help. That’s where making sure web content is efficiently delivered comes in. It’s about the conservation of bandwidth and the compression of megabytes, especially on mobile networks.

Four problems you can’t ignore

Most of the web performance challenges we face today can be traced to four basic trends:

1. Third-party content. Any given web site incorporates vast amounts of third-party content. This includes content such as advertisements, widgets and syndicated feeds.
2. Dynamic. Sites are now required to be more dynamic than our infrastructure can handle. Twitter feeds are constantly changing, and the data can’t be cached, and furthermore, we expect a high degree of personalization and individually relevant experiences when we visit sites.
3. More, more, more. We’re experiencing a content explosion: Sites have more pages, more pictures and more videos packed into the pages than ever before.
4. New devices. Myriad new devices hit the market every month, all of which are Internet-enabled. This doesn’t just mean more laptops and iPads; we’re also talking about refrigerators, low-cost home security cameras, and even cars!

And why is this happening? There’s a new party in town, and its called social media. Our problems aren’t capacity problems; it’s just that our content delivery infrastructure wasn’t designed for what’s happening. The existing infrastructure is designed on three premises and assumptions:

1. Single origin. Most content will originate from the same web servers, so if these are working properly, then everything is good.
2. Static content. Most information will stay the same, and therefore can be cached across the data center and Internet.
3. Fast delivery. Because content comes from a single origin and doesn’t change, caching and route optimization can deliver everything quickly.

Social media turns these assumptions on their heads. Content is mashed-up, syndicated, streamed from everywhere — with different qualities of service. So even if you’re paying $500,000 for traditional performance solutions, your pages will still slow down to the lowest common denominator, such as a slow ad service or the slower speeds of a streamed page from Facebook.

Yes, we can build new infrastructure, but it will take too long, and it may not be enough. We can throw more of the same performance technology at it, but this only helps so much, and the traditional technology doesn’t do anything for today’s dynamic content, which can’t be cached. At the end of the day, these four factors have driven intense demand for a new type of web acceleration.

With our powers combined, we are …

The good news is that we have the technology to solve the problem, and there has already been a good deal of investment to put the wheels in motion. We’re seeing the many web performance players converge to do this.

Recently, Limelight Networks acquired AcceloWeb for up to a rumored $20 million in a cash and stock deal. AcceloWeb’s technology does precisely what I’ve hinted at so far: It accelerates web content so that it can travel faster over our existing Internet infrastructure. Limelight, a traditional CDN company, is making a large investment in Web content optimization and acceleration. These are two fundamentally different markets converging under one company, yet we hardly heard any talk about the strategy behind the investment.

Similarly, Google recently announced that Google Analytics now offers a Site Speed Analytics Report. It was greeted with applause from the web performance community, but nobody really heard about how this “feature” had much broader implications for the web.

Google isn’t just helping you measure your site’s speed; they want the Web to be lightning fast. It’s critical to the future of their business that the web isn’t crippled by performance woes.

Their revenue is still largely ad-based, which contribute costly seconds to load times if we don’t find a solution. Not to mention: The faster a site loads, the more ads Google can serve. Google cares about web performance because it’s absolutely critical to their business and the future of the web itself.

Just how big is this?

This isn’t just the market opportunity for web content acceleration that’s exciting here. What’s more important is the future of the web, and what this evolution in web performance will spawn.

We’re talking about webscale personalization that isn’t held back by performance problems. Personalization is the web topic du jour, but we’re not going to reach the promise of true web personalization if we can’t load web pages faster than we’re doing on average today.

Similarly, the mobile web is going to face major obstacles if we can’t tune our apps to perform on even the most troubled networks. And we sure as heck aren’t going to usher in the future of virtual personal assistants if we can’t conduct complex processing and deliver that content at the speeds that consumers demand.

Oddly enough, the success or failure of these sexy technologies hinges on a critical evolution in web performance. All of a sudden, the emerging web acceleration and content optimization market is starting to look a lot sexier to investors, entrepreneurs and incumbent technology companies alike.

Ed Robinson is the CEO of Aptimize, a company that produces software to accelerate websites.

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Today, EETimes.com came out with its list of the top 10 cash-rich chip makers, with Intel, Qualcomm and TSMC leading the charge. And revenue is on the rise again for chip firms, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, which said today that total sales reached $19.06 billion in August. That’s up 5 percent from the month before, though still down by 16 percent from the same month last year.

So they have the cash, they have revenue growth and some of the top 10 clearly need to add new products to their existing arsenals. With that in mind, we think Intel (with $10.45 billion in cash) and Qualcomm (with $9.89 billion) will be the two that actually go shopping, though their picks might surprise us. Intel will likely keep up its software splurges rather than buy any hardware companies. In a bid to make multicore programming easier, the chip giant bought bought two compiler makers this summer. It also bought Wind River, a software maker for the embedded chip market, in an effort to get its chips inside our set-top boxes, televisions and phones.

Another hot area is that of 3-D, making companies such as Organic Motion, which makes software that tracks a person’s movement and turns it into a 3-D representation, potential targets. Those that focus on 3-D using x86-based chips could prove to be likelier buys, however, especially as Intel gears up to release Larrabee, its x86-based graphics chip. (Related Research from GigaOM Pro, subscription required: How 3-D TV Will Go From Hasseloff to Must-Have)

Less likely buys for Intel would be semiconductor equipment makers. The equipment industry is struggling, and Intel has already invested in keeping one key player alive, but it may take a step further into outright ownership, if it feels forced to do so. Intel (along with Samsung and TSMC) is also trying to get the industry to move to making chips on larger wafers, despite protest from the equipment makers that such a shift is unnecessary and would be too costly for them. Owning a company that can help jump-start the process may convince the rest of the equipment companies to follow, or it may push Intel back into becoming a vertically integrated chip shop.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm could diversify away from chips and start bulking up on infrastructure services, such as when it bought Firethorn to increase its presence in mobile banking. Or we could see it go after players such as Jasper Wireless or Kore Telematics to grow its M2M connectivity business. If it wants to pursue a mobile CDN play for its MediaFLO network, it will likely have to buy some technology to bring a CDN service together.

Readers, who do you think Intel, Qualcomm or other chip vendors should buy?

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Akamai touts the results of a Tolly Group study as evidence of the wisdom of its approach. The study was conducted by delivering a Citrix XenDesktop and NetScaler environment from a hosting location in California to various points throughout the United States and Asia. In the U.S., throughput improvement ranged from 5.51 percent to Boca Raton , Fla., to 22.69 percent to Cambridge, Mass. However, throughput improvement to Seoul, Bangalore, India, and Singapore was 171 percent, 178 percent and 706.25 percent, respectively. Akamai’s public-Internet overlay, the company says, also ensures reliable delivery in the cases of natural disasters that can cripple private network connections.

Neil Cohen, Akamai’s director of product marketing, told me another of Akamai’s goals is to enable VDI access anywhere users have an  Internet connection, even if it’s not via the corporate network. This notion, dubbed “desktops as a service,” is gaining momentum. Earlier this month at VMworld, IBM announced its Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud service.

The managed service for VDI is part of Akamai’s strategic move to become a bigger part of corporate IT than merely accelerating web-content delivery. At Structure 09, Akamai President Paul Sagan laid out Akamai’s cloud computing case, and the company has teamed with SaaS platform provider OpSource to optimize application delivery via the web.

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“We are looking into the cause and waiting for details,” he said, pointing out that the outage took place for a shade over two hours. In a follow-up update, the rep said that the “degradation in service” took place during a five-hour “maintenance window” by NTT, and that “three of our customers in Asia reported service performance degradation during that time.” If you are one of the sites (or service) that was impacted by this outage, get in touch or leave a comment. I will update the story as soon as I get more details. Further update: Readers are saying that Limelight is still down — please see the comments section. If this outage is happening it is not good testimony for Limelight, which recently touted that its global content delivery capacity had exceeded two terabits per second (Tbps). Or as the company colorfully put it, enough capacity to deliver broadcast-quality content to over 2 million simultaneous Internet users.

Image: Limelight Networks Map, courtesy of the company

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Much of this is a pre-emptive strike at Microsoft’s upcoming cloud offering. Microsoft has a huge advantage: It owns the stack from OS and virtual machine through to application. Amazon wants to compete on reliability and performance, rather than software suites and licensing. But there are still some things missing before enterprises will really embrace it.

Back in May, most of the people we asked were more likely to trust Amazon than Microsoft with their enterprise applications. But while enterprise customers are using Amazon already, in many cases that use is limited to a department or a short-term project. If Amazon wants to capture entire IT departments, it needs to prove it’s as good or better than in-house infrastructure. And that means delivering responsive, highly available applications, not just an SLA.

To accomplish this, Amazon needs to tackle performance and availability at an architectural level. When companies build their own applications, they rely on building blocks like load-balancing, WAN acceleration, managed DNS and redundant data centers. Fortunately, this is where much of Amazon’s roadmap leads.

• Network performance: Amazon’s CDN will get static content closer to users. With availability zones, Amazon can also get computation near the edge. All of this reduces the time it takes to deliver bits to users. But it can be faster still: Modern enterprises squeeze every millisecond out of the network. Amazon should also add route optimization, HTTP and TCP optimization to really address network delay.


Amazon's plans for integrated scaling, monitoring, and load balancing in EC2

• Processing performance: Internet architects improve server performance with load-balancing. First send the request to the fastest data center, then send it to the fastest machine in that data center. If there aren’t any fast machines, the newly announced dynamic scaling will make new ones. All that’s missing (though hinted at) is the ability to measure user experience so EC2 knows when to add new servers. Amazon needs a complete load balancing/monitoring/scaling strategy — with proper controls so IT staff can manage it — to make elastic computing a reality. While they’re at it, a performance SLA would be great, too.
• Network availability: Those same load balancing technologies improve uptime, using DNS or BGP to bypass unreachable data centers. Amazon needs to launch a SimpleDNS service, tied to availability zones and performance, that gives operators more control. It’s going to have to deal with DNS when it launches its CDN anyway. This looks less like managed DNS (Amazon uses UltraDNS already) and more like products from F5, Citrix or others. Amazon also needs to open up about its carriers and peering arrangements for enterprises to feel comfortable.
• Processing availability: Big Internet sites don’t achieve high uptime with machines that always work. Instead, they monitor for failure and then have the load balancers take out bad servers. That way, overall availability can be high, even when individual components are broken. Amazon should add load testing and profiling capabilities – particularly since EC2 doesn’t give users deep visibility into the platform — to ensure that applications work worldwide under stress.

As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out, enterprises like cloud computing for its economics, its elastic capacity and its ability to deliver high reliability. With this roadmap, Amazon goes after Microsoft’s weak spots. But it’s not there yet.

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In an email to its customers today, Amazon said that the service will be available later this year and will utilize the company’s points of presence in North America, Europe and Asia.

This new service will provide you a high-performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.

Ironically, Amazon was beaten to the CDN punch by New York-based Voxel, which started offering CDN services based on Amazon’s S3 service. ”We are announcing this right now because we want to give a heads up to our customers,” said Adam Selipsky, VPr of product management and developer relations for AWS. It’s more like putting their competition on notice, but Adam was too polite to say that. “It is a more horizontal and broad offering.” In other words, while it is not going to replace Akamai tomorrow, it is going to make CDNs affordable even for the tiniest startup, without major cash outlays.

Why is this service disruptive? Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like a brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of the long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.

In addition, the company will publish its prices on the web — most importantly it is going to be inexpensive. And that will make the service even more attractive to hundreds of small companies who are already using Amazon Web Services for their web operations, who don’t want to sign long contracts with CDN operators. When I asked Tal Saraf, general manager of the AWS Content Delivery Service, if the company expected the video-delivery to be one of the most used service, he said the company expected to delivery all sorts of content, including web objects (images, JavaScripts etc.)

You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.

Amazon executives declined to talk about the pricing. “We will talk about the pricing when we launch the service,” Selipsky said. He declined to comment on the impact the pricing will have on their competitors -– nearly two dozen content delivery networks –- and how much their business is going to suffer. Dow Jones Venture Source estimates that from 2005 through the second quarter of 2008, almost $980 million was invested in content delivery companies.

If Amazon delivers what it is promising -– a simple, API-based CDN – then it would put then not only ahead of all CDN players, but also force rivals to meet the rules (and pricing) set by Amazon. There is a good chance that it’s going to drive weaker players right out of the game.

My final take on this news: Akamai is less likely to be impacted in the near term, but it further commoditizes the CDN business and forces a big shakeout in the industry, taking down the small and the weak. Akamai has been focusing on value-add services, as a way to stay ahead of the commoditization of the basic CDN services.

Read Amazon CTO Werner Vogels take on the news on his blog.

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Through his work, part of a larger effort at the university, it was concluded that TCP, which came into existence in 1981, needed to be replaced by a more updated technology, one that could handle today’s Internet traffic. This updated version would take into account ballooning file sizes, the availability of fatter pipes, and the hyperglobalization of the Internet. In 2002, the researchers offered up this approach to TCP — called FastTCP — as a new standard.

That same technology is the bedrock upon which Low (as CEO) and Cheng Jin (as VP of engineering) have built FastSoft, a Pasadena, Calif.-based startup with $4.3 million in funding from Miramar Venture Partners and Caltech. (The company is currently meeting with VCs in the hopes of raising a new round of funding.) The two-year-old startup has developed a device that sits between a router and the Internet (or any other wide area network) and ensures the faster, smoother delivery of data.

FastSoft’s technology can be filed under the general “Internet acceleration” category along with the tech sold by vendors like Cisco, Juniper and Riverbed Technologies. But FastSoft’s true competitors are in fact content delivery network providers such as Limelight Networks. Typically a CDN has points of presence across the globe that are wired together for the specific purpose of quickly delivering information, mostly by offering up information from POPs that are closest to the Internet surfer.

By comparison, FastSoft’s technology allows you to get the same results by serving up information to one location from another, regardless of how far apart they are, without going through an expensive CDN. This is one of the reasons why tiny the startup counts the likes of Honda, Post Group, Reuters Australia and apparently Getty Images (though I haven’t yet been able to confirm this) among its customers. It also just snagged Technicolor, which, like Getty, is building what amounts to its own digital asset distribution network and will use FastSoft to deliver big production files to remote locations.

One of my sources tells me that FastSoft is also working closely with Internap, a company that operates data centers and a CDN. According to some of the experts I spoke with last week, a partnership here could be a game-changer for data centers, since buying and deploying FastTCP would save them a ton of money on bandwidth, a big factor these days due to the explosion of online video.

What’s Wrong With TCP? Nothing, But….

In order to understand FastSoft (and FastTCP), one needs to step back and understand TCP, specifically how it works and what its drawbacks are: In data transmission, a TCP client receives a packet; it then sends back an acknowledgment of that packet to the sender. Once the sender receives the acknowledgment another packet is sent, and so on. At any given time, an untold number of packets can be mid-transit.

This stream, Low explained to me, is where problems can crop up. TCP is based on the additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm, which slowly increases the speed if delivery is going smoothly, but when packets start playing truant, decreases the rate of transfer by half — sort of like going from fifth gear to second, without the option of gradually slowing down. (See the sawtooth-like pattern in the accompanying chart.)

All of which is fine when it comes to lightweight files such as emails or plain web pages, but makes the transferring of large files such as videos clips painful. As FastSoft executives pointed out, a 30 percent reduction in throughput on a 10 Mbps DSL line can mean the difference between an HD movie experience and a standard definition one. A 50 percent slowdown on a high-capacity line, such as an OC-3 connection, means the speed capacity goes from 155Mbps to a mere 77.5 Mbps.

What Makes FastTCP Better?

The idea behind FastTCP, Low explained, was to overcome the shortcomings of AIMD. He and his fellow researchers found that if they measured the time it took to send and receive acknowledgments from receivers, along with tracking lost packets, they could overcome the problem of traffic overflows and make the transfers smoother.

To that end, FastSoft has developed a box called the E-Series Accelerator, which figures out the fastest way to deliver packets to the end destination without flooding the networks, thus restricting packet loss to a manageable level.

The system can also use intelligence to figure out if the packet losses are random or if there’s a major underlying problem, like network congestion, and take appropriate preventive measures. Getting back to my automobile analogy, it’s like having a speed radar and a live traffic feed along with the ability to smoothly downshift gears.

Why It Matters

One of the reasons I got so excited about FastSoft is because there’s no technology required on the recipient site, nor does there needs to be any change to the current TCP paradigm.

To be sure, nothing is a slam dunk. There are a lot of things that need to go right in order for this company to make it. And they will undoubtedly be asked to explain the logic behind putting yet another potential point of failure inside the network.

Low, however, is confident that the cost savings (by not paying big bucks to CDNs) on infrastructure and bandwidth, along with the ability to ensure the smoother (and faster) delivery of data, is going to convince large companies dealing with big digital files to try out FastSoft.

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Thanks to some helpful friends in Israel and in the CDN business, we found out that the co-founders of the company are Ronni Zehavi and David Drai. Zehavi is the CEO and Drai is the CTO of the new company. They both worked for anti-spam and security software company, Commtouch Software.

Their profiles on LinkedIn describe Cotendo as a company “developing a sophisticated innovative infrastructure which provides an efficient and low-cost CDN service. Cotendo new approach open the ability for new services which help content providers to get the maximum benefit from content acceleration.” The company has 10 employees, many of them from Commtouch. It is not clear what kind of technology they have developed and how much funding Cotendo has raised.

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