F E A T U R E
Award: E-Commerce Host Service Provider
When we evaluated the leading eight e-commerce hosting service providers to the Fortune 500 (see "E-Commerce's Great 8" at www.networkcomputing.com/1101/1101f1.html), Sprint's Web Hosting Service won hands down. The service excels in both its fully managed services and its collocation capabilities.
Sprint is a relative newcomer to commerce hosting and is still building its client list, but has done things right from the outset. When we evaluated the service, Sprint claimed it had 100 percent network/managed-server uptime over its 18-month lifespan. The company credits its record to a local and geographic load-balancing architecture it built using customized gear from RadWare.
Sprint's partnership with Deloitte also augurs well in the increasingly complex world of e-commerce integration, providing access to some of the hundreds of Java, JavaScript and XML specialists at Deloitte.
We especially like the way Sprint involves its customers in change management and security, alerting them a week in advance of non-emergency security fixes and updates. Sprint is flexible in letting its managed-hosting customers refuse changes like a system patch that isn't critical to security; such a willingness to work with the customer is rare in large hosting environments. Yet, when it comes to managed-hosting server changes, Sprint is a disciplinarian, pretesting all changes, right down to new CGI scripts.
-- Christine Hudgins
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Distributed Load-Balancing Solution
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Winner
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3DNS, F5 Networks, (888) 882-4447, (206) 505-0800
www.F5.com
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Finalists
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Alteon Web OS 5.0 (now shipping 6.0), Alteon WebSystems, (888) ALTEON-1
www.alteonwebsystems.com
WSD-DS, WSD-NP, RadWare, (888) 234-5763, (201) 512-9771
www.radware.com
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Award: Distributed Load-Balancing Solution
Corporate Web sites and their availability have taken on new levels of importance in a year marked by stunning Web growth and global market emergence. In our pages last year, we looked at numerous global load-balancing solutions that all hit performance highs (see "Sharing the Load Across the Web" at www.networkcomputing.com/1025/1025f1.html). At the top of the list, F5 Networks' 3DNS delivered great performance, along with intuitive management and security features such as a single point of management, configuration distributions to remote nodes, and integrated Secure Shell remote access. The product distributes load between physically separated sites by monitoring each server's QoS (Quality of Service) metrics. 3DNS probes the servers and measures packet rate, Web-request completion rate, round-trip time and network-topology information. Network and Web administrators who are considering these technologies will not be disappointed.
-- Christine Hudgins
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Web Server Software
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Winner
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iPlanet Web Server, iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions (Sun-Netscape Alliance), (888) 786-8111, (650) 960-1300
www.iplanet.com
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Finalists
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Apache 1.3.9 Web Server, The Apache Software Foundation
www.apache.org
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 on Windows NT Server 4.0, Microsoft Corp., (800) 426-9400, (425) 882-8080
www.microsoft.com
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Award: Web Server Software
In our October 1999 roundup of Web servers, we got our first glimpse of the results of the new Sun-Netscape Alliance (see "The Best Bets for Web Development" at www.networkcomputing.com/1020/1020f1.html). Looking back, iPlanet clearly is the most improved and deserving Web server covered in our pages. The product showed solid performance, keeping perfect step with Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) and consistently pounding Apache into submission (sorry, Slashdotters). This Web server is a breeze to manage, with a Web-based administration interface that's far easier to use than Apache's or IIS's. It also demonstrated remarkable stability during our month-long test period. Now, with its recent release for Linux (kernel 2.2.x or later), iPlanet is available for all platforms, with nearly equal feature sets across the board. The product also offers the widest range of options for Web application developers, including CGI, Netscape API (NSAPI), Java servlets, JSP, and Server Side JavaScript. Although we're sad to see the end of the Netscape name, it's good to encounter the same quality and performance we've come to expect from Netscape and its new companion, Sun Microsystems.
-- Christine Hudgins
Award: E-Commerce Server Platform
The "e" in e-commerce might as well stand for "ever-evolving." The next big evolution in e-commerce is a shift in emphasis from back-end systems to multicompany workflow integration. IBM Corp.'s WebSphere product family is best prepared to take on that challenge.
The IBM platform includes WebSphere's strong standards-based applications server and the WebSphere Commerce Server, which was known as Net.Commerce when we examined e-commerce platforms last fall. But the cross-platform integration IBM offers with its MQSeries-based Commerce Integrator is the company's biggest differentiator. WebSphere's integration technology works today, whereas rebuilding CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) or plugging New Age RPCs (remote procedure calls), such as Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol, into XML's development will still take time.
There's also something to be said for the platform or toolkit approach IBM has taken to e-commerce. While WebSphere includes the basic applications needed for e-commerce, such as a store-creator tool and a personalization-rules engine, its modular approach lends flexibility to constantly changing e-commerce applications requirements. The commerce server provides some support for standards such as Java and XML, and we expect to see it evolve to the same breadth of standards support evident today in WebSphere.
-- Christine Hudgins
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