Strangeloop Networks
Strangeloop Networks develops and delivers a family of network appliances purpose‐built to accelerate Microsoft ASP.NET and AJAX applications. The Strangeloop AppScaler, the first member of the family to be unveiled, offers real‐time network‐based optimization for Dynamic Web Applications and improves by an order of magnitude the performance and scalability of today’s highly interactive, personalized web applications without changes to software, servers or the network.
With Strangeloop in their network, businesses, government and education organizations can deliver powerful, interactive, personalized applications that engage employees and partners and drive business success.
The Need
Enterprises are increasingly embracing new dynamic, interactive web technologies, to reach customers, employees and partners. As Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group Senior Vice President of Enterprise Research, notes. “The rapid consumerization of the enterprise will continue as social computing, video and peer‐to‐peer communications, blogs and wikis move to front and center.” Across industry, government and education, IT departments are under extreme pressure to rapidly deliver new web‐based capabilities to larger and larger user communities. Innovative organizations are using the Microsoft ASP.NET framework, and focusing on rapid feature development. They are creating rich, dynamic applications, where pages are customized at every click and stitched together from multiple databases. As they roll out these dynamic web applications, organizations are encountering significant performance bottlenecks that threaten the success of the application.
Adding computing and network resources, or existing static application acceleration devices, provides only temporary relief. Network managers spend their time tuning the network, but still the user encounters slow pages. The development team finds themselves trapped in an endless application tuning loop, delaying new features and putting new development on hold while they focus on getting the pages to load fast enough that customers and employees don’t give up using the application. In addition, development managers report that the more they optimize the application, the more they must invest to keep it optimized: building new features becomes more complicated, development must become more structured, developers need more expertise in optimization and the fast‐to‐market, low‐cost of development promise of the ASP.NET framework is compromised.
The ASP.NET performance bottlenecks are caused by the interactive and personalized nature of these new, dynamic applications. With roundtrips, data lookups and information volumes increasing exponentially, the only real solution lies in increasing the efficiency of each step in building the web page. IT organizations and the enterprises they serve need a new solution that allows them to truly realize the benefits of the ASP.NET framework; a solution that allows dynamic web applications to scale, without sacrificing performance, without breaking the budget on new servers and network equipment and without rewriting applications. They need a cost effective, network‐based solution that integrates seamlessly into their existing infrastructure, is simple to deploy and manage and delivers exceptional performance at scale– a solution that Strangeloop Networks delivers.
The Strangeloop Solution
Many enterprises believe the key to increased application performance is optimizing the network by adding servers, more network capacity and traditional static application acceleration devices. While these measures provide some gain, ASP.NET applications have some inherent bottlenecks that cannot be removed by increasing server or network capacity. Traditional acceleration devices are incorporating limited static caching features which offload the server, but they lack the dynamic features needed to fully exploit browser caching, and the visibility of the application and the data lookups to offload the application. Rules‐based caching cannot optimize highly dynamic unpredictable content.
The Strangeloop AppScaler appliance is an innovative solution that brings together the power of caching and data management techniques with the speed and agility of an intelligent network device, a device that can optimize in real‐time.
The key to this real‐time optimization is what we call Dynamic Choreography—ensuring the right data is in the right place at the right time and that unnecessary transfers are reduced. Dynamic Choreography combines realtime visibility and learning from application behavior with caching treatments to implement specific ASP.NET optimization features in real‐time. The AppScaler can call on the ASP.NET application, its database, the browser and the AppScaler’s own high performance cache to choreograph the data flow. AppScaler implements these changes without changing the code, the servers, the network infrastructure or the behavior of the application. By applying Choreography treatments in‐line, in real‐time, the Strangeloop AppScaler appliance can immediately respond to increasing and unpredictable demands on dynamic web applications.
The Market
According to Gartner Research ASP.NET development represents more than 50 per cent of new application development worldwide, with ASP.NET applications emerging across industries and enterprise application categories. A recent Yankee group survey of IT managers found that ASP.NET performance was one of their top challenges. As organizations roll out this myriad of web‐based applications to more and more users, the demand for performance solutions will grow, creating a new market for dynamic web application acceleration devices.
The Team
Strangeloop’s leadership team
• Jonathan Bixby, President and Chief Executive Officer
• Virginia Balcom, Vice President of Marketing
• Richard Campbell, Product Evangelist
• Joshua Bixby, Senior Vice President Product Management
• Kent Alstad, Chief Architect
• Lee Purvis, Vice President, Software Development
The Strangeloop management team is the same team that founded IronPoint Technology, a leader in dynamic content publishing systems for enterprise clients, acquired in 2006. As one of the first enterprise‐class applications based on the ASP.NET framework, IronPoint was able to rapidly develop and deploy new client sites, growing to more than 250 significant clients, serving over 400 million page views per month in just 3 years. As IronPoint leaders, the Strangeloop team encountered the challenges of maintaining performance for dynamic, highly interactive web applications while extending the application to thousands of users, and became experts in accelerating ASP.NET applications. Strangeloop Networks was founded by this team of ASP.NET pioneers with the goal of building an appliance that would offload acceleration from ASP.NET applications and IT departments.
Strangeloop Networks, founded in 2006, is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia.
| Strangeloop Networks Announces $11.5 Million in Series A Funding | 07/23/2007 - 23:13 | $11Million |