Web-acceleration company Zeus Technology is in growth mode — the Cambridge-based company has just opened a US office, and is expanding its staff and distribution channel. But unlike most of its peers, Zeus has seen it all before.
Founded in 1996, the company was one of the darlings of the dot-com boom, making it practically ancient in IT-industry terms. Yet it has come back from the lows of the crash to achieve a significant place among the fast-growing number of companies specialising in high-performance web infrastructure.
Now, the dramatic increase in number and complexity of web applications, the explosion in broadband connectivity, branch office server centralisation projects and the growth of complicated technologies such as blades and virtualisation in the data centre have all created a market seemingly tailor-made for Zeus.
Web-application acceleration sits in a grey area between the expertise of networking companies such as Cisco and giants such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, which focus on enterprise applications. It's a diverse area that everyone seems to define a different way, but whatever the measure, it is growing rapidly. Gartner estimated the market for what it calls application delivery controllers (ADCs) to be worth more than $1.5bn at the end of 2006, a 23 percent increase over 2005.
"Our definition of it is much broader than Gartner's," says Damian Reeves, Zeus co-founder and chief technology officer. "It's an absolutely huge market." Gartner splits the market into ADCs — generally appliances that sit in front of web applications and handle application speed and reliability — and WAN Optimisation Controllers (WOCs), which control network performance.
Zeus's main product, Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM), is different from the ADC appliances sold by competitors such as F5 Networks, Citrix NetScaler and Riverbed, in that it can take the form of either an appliance or software that runs on a traditional server, blade or inside a virtual machine. "We're walking toward the network, from the application side. That's something our classic competitors, who come from the hardware networking side, can't do."
At a glance
- Company name: Zeus Technology
- Size: 50 employees
- Based: Cambridge, UK
- Set up in: 1996
- Key products: Zeus Web Server, Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager
- In short: A key player in the world of high-speed web infrastructure, with an unusual approach and a unique track record
Besides conventional acceleration appliance vendors, big software players are getting into the acceleration game — middleware from the likes of Oracle and BEA and even high-performance features being built into Apache. IBM's WebSphere business unit is a significant player in the market via its DataPower XML and SOA acceleration appliances.
And the multitude of start-ups in the space even includes a company co-founded by Zeus co-founder Adam Twiss in 2002 — CacheLogic, which focuses on high-performance media delivery using peer-to-peer technology.
Nevertheless, Zeus has managed to continue growing its own niche, with its infrastructure powering more than one million sites for more than 800 customers, including the likes of BT, China Telecom, Nasa and Play.com.
Ovum analyst Gary Barnett sees Zeus's classic market as the top 1 percent of companies with very exacting performance and availability requirements, comparing them to a supplier of parts to a Grand Prix team. "Grand Prix teams will buy injector jets from a two-man band if they think they can get a 100th-of-a-second advantage," Barnett says. "Zeus's ongoing challenge is to stay at that cutting edge."
It was once all so much simpler. Zeus's genesis was at Cambridge University, where co-founders Twiss and Reeves were students at Churchill College. The idea was inspired by the networking situation that existed at Cambridge at the time, where students had access to extreme bandwidth, but were stuck with servers that would fall apart under the slightest pressure.
"It was clear that while that was an anomalous situation in 1993, it would soon become the norm," Reeves says. "The growth of internet traffic was outpacing Moore's Law, and soon everybody would have that problem. The performance and scalability problems were so acute that we could see they needed an entirely different kind of solution."
The co-founders' answer was technology that could handle a large number of simultaneous internet transactions, something not envisioned by the original creators of the internet's underlying protocols.
"The internet is a relatively simple system," says Reeves. "When there's a small amount of traffic coming in, all you need is a simple program to deal with it when it comes in, and send responses back to the end users. The challenge is when the volume and importance of that traffic increases."
When the dot-com boom came along, there was suddenly a huge influx of...
