MENLO PARK, Calif. -- September 16, 1996 -- Spyglass Inc. (NASDAQ: SPYG) and Versant Object Technology Corp. (NASDAQ: VSNT) today announced a strategic relationship that directly addresses one of the greatest challenges facing users of the Web today - bandwidth issues limiting user access and functionality. By integrating the Versant ODBMS as the core caching engine within the Surfwatch ProServer, Spyglass will deliver its customers profound performance improvements. Using Versant's advanced caching technology to manage proxies, Internet service providers (ISPs) and content suppliers can get orders of magnitude improvements in bandwidth and connection capacity from the same hardware configuration, reducing the most glaring limitation on the potential of the World Wide Web. The Surfwatch ProServer will be offered to all existing Spyglass partners including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Computer Associates and others.

Under the terms of the agreement, Spyglass has also licensed the Versant ODBMS for future use within other Spyglass products, including the Spyglass Web Server and Spyglass WebNotes products.

"Performance on the Web is clearly the greatest pain point users are experiencing today," said Natasha Krol, vice president at META Group, a Connecticut-based industry research firm. "By opening up bandwidth with the SurfWatch ProServer caching functionality, Versant and Spyglass may have created a killer application for the Internet and for corporate Intranets."

The Versant-enabled proxy engine will allow a typical site with a standard PC to service the Web requests of extremely large Websites, drastically reducing network and systems requirements. By using the SurfWatch ProServer to replicate Website content, content providers and aggregators can deliver more content, quicker, to more users than was possible before. During the Spyglass benchmark, the Versant-enabled Web proxy server managed connections at a sustained rate of 40 million hits per day with an average response time of under 10 milli-seconds. Testing was conducted on a 75Mhz Pentium Processor with an 8MB cache.

"Versant provides the specialized functions for caching content that allows us to offer fast, yet controlled, access to the Web, while providing users with exactly the information they need," said Tim Krauskopf, chief technical officer at Spyglass. "Versant technology is helping us maintain our leadership position not only in Web component technology but in high-performance server technology. The performance improvements enabled by Versant made our decision to partner with an object database company an easy one."

Versant and the SurfWatch ProServer
By caching frequently used content such as URLs, SurfWatch ProServer bundled with Versant preserves valuable network and system bandwidth to be used for core computing requirements. Commerce engines will now have more capacity to service individual requests and transactions. For example, after an initial page of information is delivered from a news service such as CNN Interactive or ESPN SportsZone to a user, the same information is made available to all other requests on the local area network instantaneously, without resorting to another request across the Internet for the same piece of information. The SurfWatch ProServer is also unique because it improves bandwidth by filtering out unwanted content based on the industry leading SurfWatch technology.

"Today's announcement cements Versant's position as a key provider of the transactional Web infrastructure," said Robert Freeman, vice president of marketing at Versant. "Spyglass, its partners, and their customers will see the breakthrough performance and time-to-market advantages that Versant routinely delivers to customers. Our unique focus on supplying a transactional infrastructure for the Web allows organizations to deliver commercial applications across Intranets and the Intranet today."

About Spyglass Inc.
Spyglass Inc. (NASDAQ: SPYG) licenses World Wide Web client and server technologies. Spyglass technology is currently licensed by 102 partners, including Computer Associates Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. Spyglass technology has been licensed for use in over 200 Internet-based products and services. Spyglass' headquarters are located at 1240 E. Diehl Road, Naperville, Ill. 60563, with research and development facilities in Champaign, Ill., Cambridge, Mass. and Los Altos, Calif., and sales offices in Cambridge, Mass., Morristown, N.J., Santa Monica, Calif., San Ramon, Calif. and Hong Kong. Telephone: 630.245.6500; fax: 630.245.6693; press email inquiries: rpitzer@spyglass.com; Web server: http://www.spyglass.com.

ABOUT VERSANT

[ What's New | Products | Partners | Tech Support | About Us | Employment | Contact Us | Search | Home ]
[ C++ Solutions | SmallTalk Solutions | Internet Solutions ]