Software Delivers Before It's Asked To

Ask any IT manager what he or she would think about cutting page download times in half. The answer is easy to predict.

And predictability is the whole point of new server-based software from Fireclick. The newest version of its Blueflame product, due to be released at the beginning of the year, downloads Web pages even before the consumers' click. Fireclick is also making Blueflame available as a service, called Netflame.

Blueflame speeds Web site performance through a proprietary content delivery algorithm. Using real-time click-stream analysis, Blueflame constantly primes the browser cache one step ahead of a user's action. By downloading "most likely" page elements directly to a user's browser cache, Blueflame reduces average download times from 20 seconds to just 1 second, according to the vendor.

There are times, of course, when the predicted page is not called for.

"The additional overhead we've seen is about 10 percent. That means that 10 percent of the time, Blueflame is predownloading something that never gets seen by the user," said Fireclick's vice president of marketing Steve O'Brien.

"Most sites are sized for peak traffic, and so they're most often at 20 percent to 40 percent of capacity, in terms of bandwidth, CPU use and requests. So the traffic generated by Blueflame is absorbed by the origin site with no impact."

The results at global arts and crafts site Novica.com are impressive. On its heavily traveled pages, Novica has seen download times drop from 8 seconds to 5 seconds.

"It's pretty powerful. We've even had dial-up customers comment on our speed, which is unheard of," said Charles Hachtmann, CTO of Novica. The site has about 6 million page views and 250,000 visitors a month.

Blueflame takes advantage of the idle time during user page views to download information the user is likely to request next, such as biographical information on a particular artisan or data on art from a particular region.

"Our predictive downloading gets content into the browser cache, so that something, even if it is simply logos or graphics, will come up immediately. It gives the user the perception of a faster connection," said Steve O'Brien, vice president of marketing at Fireclick. He explained that the software works similar to a user hitting the "back" button when on a site. The content comes up immediately, because it is already in the browser cache.

The Blueflame software makes its decision about where users are likely to head by analyzing traffic and collecting macro statistics on how users transition from one page to another.

The software keeps users at a site and increases the possibility that the visitor may become a buyer, O'Brien said.

"We absolutely believe that Fireclick helps drive sales. If we can keep a customer on our site, we have time to convert their traffic to a transaction," said Hachtmann.

Blueflame is supported on Windows NT 4.0 and Solaris.

The software is offered on a service basis, with monthly fees based on the amount of traffic accelerated by Blueflame. For over 100 million page views in a month, the fee is $17,000; for 25 to 100 million views, $12,500; for 5 to 25 million, $4,400; and for under 5 million, $2,250. There is no start-up cost.

Netflame, the new application service from Fireclick, uses the same patent-pending approach to accelerate content delivery.

The pricing model for Netflame, which Fireclick said is popular with smaller sites, is similar to that of Blueflame.

It's based on pages accelerated per month. Fireclick would not offer any baseline estimates on existing customers, but said the minimums are $1,000 per month for Blueflame users and $2,000 for Netflame users.

"Netflame is for the companies that want the same e-business capabilities on their site that Blueflame offers, without having any software to install or hardware to maintain," said O'Brien.