By Ann Bednarz
Network World, 04/29/02

Boingo Wireless Egenera ForeScout Technologies Grand Central Communications Intelliden Maranti Networks MeshNetworks Proficient Networks Redline Networks Virtela Communications How last year's picks are faring

Company name: The red line on an engine tachometer is the point of maximum performance.

Origin: Founded in March 2000 by three former Dell employees.

Funding: $10 million in one round closed in July 2001.

Key investors: Advanced Technology Ventures, Echelon CEO Ken Oshman (the "O" in ROLM) and 3Com President Bob Finocchio.

CEO: Roy Johnson, most recently an executive at broadband provider 2Wire.

Products: The T/X 2000 series of Web acceleration appliances.

Redline is all about Web acceleration, but it isn't about caching. The Campbell, Calif., company has developed a family of appliances that sit in a data center between load balancers and Web servers. The appliances aim to ease the burden on Web servers by off-loading I/O responsibility from Web servers, thereby reducing the number of connections those servers have to handle. Instead of going back and forth to retrieve all page elements, the appliance grabs an entire response from a server in one TCP session. It condenses the traffic, filters out extraneous content, and readies pages for delivery to requesting PCs ÷ purportedly speeding downloads by up to 10 times in the process.

What differentiates the Redline appliance from caching devices is that it sits in the middle of the action rather than at the network's edge. Redline faces stiff competition from Web acceleration vendors such as NetScaler, Packeteer and PictureIQ. Still, the company has 30 customers, including BizRate.com, Martha Stewart Omnimedia and MSN Israel. Pricing starts at $10,000 for an appliance that serves one cluster of up to 32 servers.

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