OptiView appliance to accelerate Web pages

OptiView Technologies next week will unveil a product to address “page bulk” problems that crop up with Web content. Page bulk is when Web pages have a lot of large images or bandwidth-hogging content that takes a long time to load.

SiteCelerate will be a Web content acceleration appliance that OptiView says will combine several technologies to ensure pages don’t get slowed down by images or applications.

The combination of technologies, including proprietary image optimization and text compression, will enable SiteCelerate to speed Web content between two and 10 times faster than normal. The company says it will also offer enterprise Web managers an average page compression rate of 75%.

Other OptiView products include TurboCache, which combines image optimization and text compression with caching. OptiView execs say the product, a transparent caching proxy, can speed page downloads by as much as 75%. The product intelligently reduces the size of files before caching them.

OptiView says there are several reasons to pay attention to Web content acceleration, and the company will be delivering products to address these issues.

For one, broadband isn’t used nearly as much as was expected, and most Internet users still dial in using 56K bit/sec modems, an OptiView spokeswoman says. Plus, she says content delivery networks don’t address the problem. CDNs repopulate Web content around the world, placing that content closer to users, but they don’t reduce its overall size. And while caching helps speed page downloads by storing content unchanged, it is a hardware solution that doesn’t attack the core problem – oversized content, the spokeswoman says.

SiteCelerate is expected to be announced March 31. For more information, go to: http://www.optiview.com