Ambitious network data access server manufacturer Network Appliance Corp has acquired a software house barely one year old for its web caching technology. Privately-held Internet Middleware Corp, founded last year by University of Southern California professor Peter Danzig and based in San Jose, California, will be bought for Network Appliance common stock and options worth $10.5m, in exchange for all the outstanding shares and options of IMC. Treated as a purchase, the buy will result in a one-time charge to Network Appliance’s fourth quarter of approximately $9.5m. Danzig was a member of the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s web-caching research project, known as Harvest cache. The project showed that web proxy caching can speed up Internet and intranet access for users while decreasing the amount of bandwidth needed. When funding for the Harvest project ended in August 1996, IMC got it ready for commercial release under the name Cached, preparing a Windows NT version and speeding up the performance with multi-threading. Harvest-based caching is widely used on the Internet in its public domain Unix versions. Network Appliances, which sees high-bandwidth applications and fast modems already straining Internet service providers and corporate networks, will use the product in combination with its filer data access servers for Windows, Unix and the Web (CI No 2,964), and with its Data Ontap data access software, but will need to get the software running on and integrated with its own network operating system used in the file servers. It expects to continue selling the software on its own for Unix and NT users. Network Appliance, founded in 1993, recently re-located from Mountain View to Santa Clara, California.
