Web app delivery vendor Crescendo comes to US

With a new $5-million round of funding, Israel-born Web application optimization vendor Crescendo Networks announced this month it is moving its headquarters to the United States and quickly building a staff in Menlo Park, Calif., to better penetrate the market for improving Web application performance here.

The company already has 40 to 50 US customers, including Colgate, Carfax and Friendster, the social networking firm. And it is now adding to its staff of 75 a US office that will probably grow to employ more than 40 over the next year.

"A month ago, we had four [US employees]," said Adoram Ga'ash, Crescendo's chief executive officer, who is relocating himself from Tel Aviv. "Now we have eight. Probably next month, we'll have 20."

Crescendo is the latest in a breed of vendors selling application delivery controllers (ADCs) – products that sit between data-center servers and users, taking on the input/output work that would otherwise consume precious server computing power. Crescendo's gear maintains the communication session between users and applications, allowing servers to focus more on their core tasks: executing requests, accessing databases and running algorithms. Moreover, Crescendo's gear specializes in this function, using a mix of compression, TCP optimization, and SSL (for security). For applications that are typically accessed simultaneously by millions of users, this could save somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of a server's processing capacity, the vendor said.

Unlike established competitors F5 Networks and Citrix, whose platforms are software-based, Crescendo's system includes a hardware element – an "acceleration engine" built with custom components using its own internally developed ASICs and FPGAs – that Crescendo said increases its processing speed five- or ten-fold.

"That's the unique, differentiating factor for Crescendo and the reason for being," Ga'ash said.

Crescendo's gear interoperates with orchestration platforms from VMWare and Microsoft, for example, that dynamically allocate data-center resources, but its AppBeat ADC can also allocate resources itself.

"We can decide during peak load times to operate more servers, and…when you don't have almost any traffic going, we can shut down many of the servers," Ga'ash said.

But will data center operators want to use it in that way?

"They want to be able to perform [resource allocation], on one hand, from a top-down perspective," Ga'ash said. "But when we can provide them with all the information and work in coordination with these orchestration packages, when we have information from the users' perspective -- we don't just measure loads on servers; we see the response time and the real impact of every operation on the real life of users -- that's the right way to close the loop."

Crescendo's application server controller measures and monitors performance – especially application response time to users – and can define policies to be enforced. For example, it can give priority to shopping-cart functions, insisting on a higher level of performance for customers that are actually buying something than for those who are just browsing.

Generally speaking, ADCs become beneficial when Web apps gain an audience of at least 10,000 users or so, Ga'ash said. A pair of Crescendo products (they are typically sold in pairs for redundancy's sake) can serve about a million concurrent users and 100 or 200 servers. Crescendo is targeting both enterprises and service providers, and the company said some of its smaller customers are already using its gear in multi-tenant mode, using it with others – a choice Ga'ash thinks will become even more popular over time.

Crescendo has raised more than $45 million in venture funds over the past seven years.