Sitara seeks to turbocharge the Web

A new software product acts like a Web turbocharger, dramatically boosting the performance of existing hardware and network connections. The promise of this technology is what makes Sitara Networks, Inc. a company to watch.

Today, an end user's interaction with a Web site is unpredictable: slow responses, error message flurries, the list goes on and on.

Most administrators try to solve the problem with more CPU power and more bandwidth. But these changes might not affect the real problem, which is latency - the delays that occur because of a host of low-level software interactions.

Sitara's engineers sat down to figure out what really was happening at this level in the network. The result is a software accelerator for the World Wide Web called Sitara SpeedServer that uses sophisticated algorithms and protocol enhancements.

In practical terms, a Web page that normally downloads in 60 seconds will download in 20 seconds or less, depending on the network conditions, according to Malik Khan, founder and CEO of the Waltham, Mass., firm. The worse the conditions, the more efficient SpeedServer becomes.

Sitara has filed for an array of patents on its technology, which lets SpeedServer handle packet losses, congestion, delays and other common problems. "We look inside the network and rearchitect the way in which the application deals with these various network conditions," Khan says.

Initially, SpeedServer will be sold as a dedicated server that can work with more than one Web server. Users accessing a Sitara site download the corresponding client software, Sitara SpeedSeeker, which then can be used with any SpeedServer-powered Web site. Together the client and server create an "accelerated connection," Khan says.

SpeedServer is finishing beta tests now, and the software should be formally released in a few weeks.

To be successful, Sitara has to first find commercial and corporate buyers for SpeedServer. In turn, customers or users have to be willing to download yet another client application.