The mantra of the day in the broadband community sometimes seems to focus almost too much on “the need for speed.” Increasingly, however, attention is being paid by service providers and their customers to the challenges of things related to Quality of Service (QoS) assurances, Class of Service (CoS) experiences and overall bandwidth utilization. The reasons are simple. It all translates into performance, i.e., obtaining optimized usage of facilities while improving the user experience. At the end of the day this is about reducing costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

The reason these challenges are rising up the IT community’s priority lists is because of competitive pressures. These are not just for those in the service provider business where sweating the assets as well as fending off the incursion of OTTs and/or facilitating OTT use of under-lying network infrastructure are now critical. It is also important in virtually every industry where not just speed but high quality and secure performance and quality can really matter in providing differentiated value. In fact, market sectors such as online gaming, financial services (specifically for high-frequency trading) and energy are just a few examples where the need is present and growing fast. 


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In helping the broad spectrum of industry sectors improve their operational excellence and their users experiences in more than an incremental manner, Kaazing, a provider of live Web and mobile communications and authors of HTML5 WebSocket, has launched the new Kaazing WebSocket Gateway 4.0.  

Living up to its objective of really raising the bar, the new platform:

• Improves bandwidth utilization by up to five times
• Decreases latency by up to 50 percent
• Rduces CPU utilization by up to 25 percent - bolstering performance and scalability

With these improvements, customers can now handle more users and improve overall user experience through faster data delivery, superior bandwidth optimization and CPU efficiencies.

“This newest release will help our clients in industries like banking and gaming reduce bandwidth by as much as five times, and decrease latency by a factor of two,” said John Donnelly III, executive vice president of Kaazing. “For global gaming clients, this could mean a reduction from 60 millisecond latencies to 30 milliseconds, thereby enabling better user experience, more transactions and more revenue. This new release offers more features and is easier to develop, requiring almost no custom coding to integrate and stream message data.  No other solution provider could surpass our newest release on bandwidth efficiencies or performance.”

An extensive group of new capabilities

As Donnelly pointed out, 4.0 delivers data more efficiently without the need for custom coding. This saves companies weeks or months of work during initial deployments and ongoing maintenance of their real-time applications.

The improved bandwidth utilization is due to the new use of binary encoding and delta messaging that delivers only the net new data or message changes to clients. Kaazing says this reduces data overhead by up to five times, and could represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in development, maintenance and network costs for each real-time project over its lifetime.

In addition, the new conflation feature optimizes the experience for slow clients such as mobile users. Clients receive notification of missed messages and the latest data all rolled up into a single message, helping them keep up with real-time data. Like the bandwidth enhancements, this feature does not require a developer to write any custom code.

Additional key features of new Kaazing WebSocket Gateway 4.0 include:

• Identical configuration means all cluster members have the same configuration for simpler maintenance and making it easy to scale up
• Kaazing Command Center with new graphical interface for administrators to easily track, measure, and monitor key data and message delivery metrics
• Performance enhancements that reduce CPU usage up to 25 percent, increasing throughput for improved latency and increased numbers of users.
• Last value cache allows latest data to be always available to be received by all users, no matter when they connect to the application

Denny Page, chief engineer of TIBCO, is representative of why customers are giving the Kaazing platform praise and are looking forward to 4.0. As Page stated, “For our TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS) customers, the Kaazing platform, which powers our TIBCO Web Messaging (TWM) product, delivers incredible functionality…With the new and improved platform, our EMS customers who leverage TWM are better equipped to deliver more responsive applications and further enhance the end user experience.” 

Additional testimonials from the financial services and electric utility industries echoed the above. Performance is more than just raw bandwidth; it is about how that bandwidth is optimized in real-time and how customers experience it in terms of responsiveness and quality. Kaazing is clearly out to accelerate the HTML5 market and as noted above this is not a small step, and that makes it one to watch.