Weekly Review: Speed Is More Than Just Bandwidth

Many people mistakenly believe that broadband connectivity is the key to delivering Internet applications at high speed. This is a fallacy. There are two things that make online applications grind to a halt, and neither of them are much affected by whether you're dialling in at 28.8k or surfing across a 2Mbps ADSL link.

The first is poor Web page design. There are many ways of slowing down page download times, such as excessive use of bit-images, large quantities of redundant page code, storing of page elements on slow or congested servers, and the use of complex HTML tables that take a long time for the client computer to process. Page download times of as much as eight seconds may be fine for consumer-orientated content sites, but they're the death knell for business applications. If your application can't refresh screens in less than a second across a 28.8k link, then it just isn't commercial grade.

The second is network latency. The Internet is made up of millions of separate connections, each joined to the next by special switches, called routers. Each router adds a few milliseconds of delay — more if they're congested — while some connections are slower than others. This delay is called latency, and each extra router between the application server and the user adds a little bit more. Connecting to the Internet at high bandwidth doesn't have any impact at all on latency occurring elsewhere in the network.

Last week, Oracle and Akamai announced the fruits of a joint development effort that will help reduce the effect of latency on popular Internet applications. The Edge Side Includes (ESI) specification allows page fragments to be cached at the edge of the network, so that when part of the page changes, only that part needs to be downloaded all the way across the network. The rest remains just a couple of router hops away.

Akamai will be implementing the new standard in its network this month, but it may take longer before developers begin taking advantage of it. ESI requires a component-based approach to building Web pages that remains alien to the majority of Web developers. The art of Web design for the successful delivery of online business services is one that's still in its infancy.

SAP Channel Clarity
SAP has asked me to clarify the status of partners I mentioned in last week's review, when I noted that "SAP stands head and shoulders above its competitors as the vendor with the longest trail of failed or stumbling ASPs to its credit."

I described this as "growing carnage in SAP's ASP channel," which of course was inaccurate, since the failed partners are no longer in the channel. Readers will recall that former certified SAP application hosting partner HostLogic closed down in March, while last month saw the failure of mySAP Hosted Solutions partner FiNetrics, which had planned to serve the small business market.

SAP has pointed out that the companies that I cited as apparently successful members of its channel — including Agilera, eOnline and Qwest Cyber.Solutions — are in fact the only currently certified hosting partners mentioned in the article.

Earlier setbacks that I mentioned happened before SAP's formal creation of an accreditation process for ASPs. Australian software house Solution 6 first announced a worldwide VAR partnership to rent SAP applications as an ASP in April 1999, a month before SAP itself confirmed it was developing an application hosting strategy. The same month (May 1999), SAP solution partner and pureplay ASP Interpath became the first North American partner authorised by SAP to supply its software on monthly rental terms.

Solution 6 and Interpath subsequently failed to make any significant headway with their SAP-based ASP offerings, and both underwent severe restructuring early last year. Indeed, although Solution 6 still maintains its Centrum service, Interpath has given up on SAP altogether, preferring to offer solutions based on Microsoft, Pivotal, Broadvision and Vignette products.

My other example was Pandesic, which rather than being a partner was actually jointly owned by SAP and Intel, and used SAP R/3 as the core platform for its service. In July last year, Pandesic shocked the industry when it became the first major ASP to shut down.

SAP is right to point out that none of this impinges on the activities of its currently certified hosting partners, who collectively serve 160 customers totalling 75,000 end users in North America alone. But it still leaves me wondering why so many ASPs — whether or not they were formally certified as such by SAP — failed to make a go of offering its software as a hosted service.

This review of the week's news highlights is by ASPnews.com founder and consulting analyst Phil Wainewright. A comprehensive news digest is published every month in the ASP News Review newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers.

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