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Pivia Inc. this week introduced a service designed to increase the performance of increasingly complex Web sites while at the same time reducing the cost of operating them.
The Cupertino, Calif., companys Dynamic Application Caching Service can save businesses up to 70 percent in Web site operational costs, said CEO Neil Selvin.
The service does this by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done by the Web server. Current caching technology sits between the end-user and the Web site, handling as many user requests as possible by storing and retrieving data objects.
However, the Pivia service brings application logic into the equation, Selvin said. The software compiles each Web page into a small applet called a Pivlet. As a request comes into the Web site, the software finds and then calls into operation the appropriate Pivlet to give the right response, keeping the requests from touching the Web server.
Web site administrators, using a tool called a Compiler, can create policies that control the behavior of the sites, detailing how such things as cookies, header fields, display ads and session management will be handled. The Compiler then uses these policies to set up the Pivlets for each page of the site to reproduce the needed functionality, all without the need for time-consuming tagging.
The softwares Intelligence Module constantly collects and analyzes data to keep up with changes in content and automatically updates the content only when necessary.
All this allows for better Web performance and greater use of dynamic content while reducing the number of servers needed, Selvin said.
“How do we not only solve network problems, but also server problems?” he said. “We can remove the congestion to the Web site servers.”
Selvin estimated that the Pivlets can handle more than 90 percent of traffic to Web sites, reducing the demand on the servers.
Pivias Dynamic Application Caching software is available now as a hosted service through the company, with pricing starting as low as $5,000 per month for the service. Selvin said he hopes to be able to sell the software directly to businesses in the first quarter of 2002.