Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Stampede Breaks Free from Domino Mold with New Acceleration Software

Stampede Technologies is breaking free of its Lotus reins. Until now, the company concentrated its efforts on developing bandwidth acceleration and storage optimization software for IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino environment. But with IBM pushing the blend of Domino/Notes technology with its WebSphere environment, Stampede has had to evolve its mission. The result is TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2, which supports Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Microsoft .NET, and portal application delivered over the Web.

With a near lock on the market for compression and bandwidth optimization technology designed expressly for Domino/Notes, Stampede has enjoyed a successful existence for 10 years. Stampede benefits from a close working relationship with IBM, which, in addition to being Stampede's business partner, is also Stampede's biggest customer, helping to speed employees' access to Big Blue's internal Notes/Domino network.

When IBM backpedaled on its pledge to keep Notes/Domino separate, and stated instead that Notes would become a component of WebSphere, and that the Domino database would be migrated to DB2, the writing was on the wall for Stampede. It was time to get a move on. "They're moving away from it; they've made it quite clear: get to WebSphere, and Web Workplace, and open J2EE standard applications," says Denis Clark, the company's vice president of marketing and business development. "At this point, placing all our bets on Notes/Domino does not seem the right thing to do."

Stampede got a headstart on its move when IBM added more Internet technologies to its Notes/Domino software. Stampede's recent work in bringing support to TurboGold for three new Notes/Domino products that use Internet technologies--the iNotes Web access client, the Workplace Messaging thin e-mail client, and the QuickPlace Web-based collaborative team workspace (since renamed Lotus Team Workplace)--was instrumental in the company's move to support Web applications in general. "A lot of the experience with those products got us ready for this release, TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2, which is the first time we've moved out of the Domino space," Clark says.

With its first-generation TurboGold software, Stampede used a combination of compression, data streaming, caching, replication, and other acceleration technologies and techniques to speed data flows and application performance by up to a factor of five or more. Stampede uses much of the same technology to support Web applications with TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2, in addition to some new ones.

One of the technologies supported in TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2 is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Release 2 will work directly on the HTTP data stream, and will also compress SSL, which is a notorious processor hog, but which also burdens the network with additional traffic. Other technologies that will be introduced with this release include a new "differencing" engine that caches frequently used content on the client, and new JPEG image-compression technology.

Stampede intends to sell its new release to companies using internal portals and to gradually expand its scope from this zone of comfort as it gains more experience in the wider marketplace. Examples of the types of applications that Clark says could use the new Release 2 functionality include portals from Plumtree Software and CRM applications from SAP or Siebel Systems.

To hear Stampede tell it, the market for data compression and application acceleration technologies is growing as fast as companies' jumbo-sized Web applications. "More and more companies are adopting these portal applications, but the applications are dramatically fatter," Clark says. "So it sets up a paradox, where the Web allows more people access, but it puts more users on the same bandwidth, and as a result, they experience more wait times" than if they were connected to a local application. "The new Web applications require five to 10 times more bandwidth."

TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2 will initially support the Windows, AIX, and Linux platforms. The company is not abandoning its base, and the new software will also run on Domino servers, which means it will also run on iSeries servers running Domino. There are no plans to support TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2 directly on OS/400, however, so customers will not immediately be able to use the software to accelerate the delivery of the upcoming Express version of the WebSphere Portal that IBM is so excited about.

Stampede is looking to market its new release as a bandwidth optimizer that sits on the "edge" of a network, which would make it similar to an "appliance" application, which is not conducive to the iSeries sale, says Tom Yohe, the company's vice president of engineering. "The AS/400 is not the type of environment where you would put appliance-like software," he says. "But a lot of things can happen. We know how to port software to AS/400. As the year progresses, in 2004 we may decide to have it run on AS/400 without requiring Domino."

With some kind of merger of OS/400, AIX, and Linux operating systems on IBM's PowerPC servers expected to occur next year, the lack of native OS/400 support with TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2 may be a moot point.

Somewhere down the line, Stampede--which claims to have hundreds of customers and millions of users among Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies--plans to deliver support for Microsoft PocketPC, an operating system for PDAs. This could be an especially promising area for Stampede, as cell phones and PDAs converge and use of mobile phones and local wireless networks continue to skyrocket because of the consumers' demand to have access to all of their information, all of the time. "That's an area where acceleration gives you a big advantage," Yohe says. "We've got enough completed to know it's going to work. It won't be available with Release 2, but it certainly will be available in the 2004 timeframe."

Stampede hopes to ship TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 2 before the end of the year, and definitely before the Lotusphere 2004 conference, which will be held January 25 to 29 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.