Stampede Adds Application Plug-In to Acceleration Appliance

Published: September 27, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Stampede Technologies last week announced the availability of Acceleration On-Demand, a new offering designed to speed the delivery of bandwidth-intensive AJAX and Web 2.0 applications, but without the need to install or maintain software or hardware on the client side.

Stampede announced its plans to deliver Acceleration On-Demand last May as part of the introduction of its Stampede Application Acceleration Series, which is a hardware appliance pre-loaded with Stampede's acceleration technology. This series of appliances, which bears the coincidental acronym SaaS, employ a range of techniques--including load balancing, SSL offloading, image reduction, static caching, cache differencing, uni- and bi-directional compression, and multiplexing--to improve the throughput of Web applications.

The big difference between SaaS and the bevy of network acceleration devices on the market is that Stampede's hardware only needs to be installed on the server side, whereas most network acceleration offerings traditionally require similar devices on both ends of the pipe. Obviously, this gives users the capability to serve speedy Web 2.0 applications to thousands of users without installing additional hardware, which is very important for software as a service (SaaS) and application service provider (ASP) providers.

Acceleration On-Demand is one of three client-side choices available to SaaS users. The others are HTTP/HTTPS Layer 7 acceleration Winsock Layer 5 acceleration. Acceleration On-Demand differentiates itself by not requiring a client-side software component to be downloaded on the client's machines, whereas the others do require that piece of software.

Stampede's Acceleration On-Demand client is available now with the Stampede Application Acceleration Series. Client licensing starts at $35 for a single license. SaaS appliances start at $40,000. For more information, visit www.stampede.com.