Software adds oomph to Lotus apps

DAYTON, OHIO - Stampede Technologies, which offers software for making Lotus Domino work better for remote users, is now turning its attention to local users with a client/server package that boasts new traffic control, storage and management features that work over LANs.

The company's Enterprise Edition of TurboGold features technology to make HTML-based traffic faster by as much as 65% and compression technology that optimizes storage capacity by nearly 85%, according to company officials. Stampede says new support for multicast improves efficiencies of broadcast updates to Domino server databases by as much as 85%. A new management console promises administrators control from a single location.

"What companies want today is to get more [return on investment] out of their systems and to get more productivity out of users," says Dana Gardner, an analyst with Aberdeen Group. He says Stampede's technology lets companies move data more inexpensively and efficiently, and loosen storage-limit constraints on users. Stampede also is poised to move beyond Domino in future releases to include XML data, which can be bandwidth-intensive.

"Stampede seems ready to move upstream to providing acceleration for that data," Gardner says.

Stampede's Enterprise Edition Web acceleration focuses on Domino server applications, Lotus's Web-based e-mail and QuickPlace, its Web-based team collaboration application.

The new compression technology, AutoZip, automatically zips attachments stored on the Domino server. This lets companies add storage capacity without upgrading software or hardware. Attachments are unzipped automatically when sent between users of Notes clients with TurboGold software installed. Recipients without TurboGold must unzip attachments manually. The company also offers a stand-alone AutoZip Server Utility that can be used to zip existing attachments on a Domino server.

The Enterprise Edition's Multicator feature plugs into an IP network's multicast features and broadcasts updates from Domino databases.

"Updates are sent individually to each user. Now you can do that through multicast," says Tom Yohe, vice president of engineering for Stampede. "And we use Domino replication to ensure that the update is delivered."

Stampede also has added traffic-shaping capabilities that plug into network-based traffic-shaping engines, such as those from Packeteer, which has formed an alliance with Stampede. Users can attach quality-of-service levels to Domino server applications, databases and e-mail along with assigning that traffic to specific ports.

Finally, Enterprise Edition comes with a policy management engine that lets users set priorities on all the new features.

TurboGold supports Lotus Domino 4.51 and above. The client runs on all Win32 platforms, and the server runs on Windows NT, 2000 and XP; and IBM's iSeries, pSeries and zSeries platforms.

Client licenses start at $63, and server licenses start at $1,913.

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