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VARs and ISVs selling Web-based solutions to corporate accounts will have a new platform by the end of this year: a joint offering from Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) and Netscape Communications Corp. SGI has licensed Netscape's HTTP engine server source code as part of a two-year, US$250 million project called Everest, under which SGI aims to build the world's most powerful, scalable Web servers. Target customers are 200 global ISPs, including telcos and corporations with "Web supersites." It's a high priority for Silicon Graphics," said Ed McCracken, chairman and chief executive officer of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. "I think it will make a difference in the way Web server capability is provided to the industry." The joint high-performance server is scheduled for a late 1997-early 1998 delivery. It will initially have 32 or 64 processors and run on SGI's IRIX OS. The objective, McCracken said, is to make Web servers 10 times faster, in two years' time, than they are today. "It requires a lot of changes to the software to make that happen," he conceded. "Web servers haven't been able to scale like supercomputers have, or like some database systems have." He said there are about 4,000 ISPs and at least one million Web sites (a figure that's doubling roughly twice a year). And 95 per cent of Web server purchases come from about five per cent of companies. These sites have quite often thousands of Web servers," McCracken said. "They're difficult to manage, [have] exponential user growth, [and] they are all demanding much more performance on the Web server." Maureen Mottonen, vice-president of hardware research at IDC Canada, said SGI is looking to profit from the trend toward application rehosting, where corporations evaluate the number of servers in place and replace them with cheaper and more efficient centralized approaches. "SGI is attempting to capitalize on that marketplace with an application-specific solution in terms of addressing the Web or intranet market," Mottonen says. In terms of SGI's existing product offerings, Everest is "not a leap as much as a natural extension of their Internet strategy," she says. "It makes logical sense for them to offer a fully featured high functioning Web server solution to attack either the ISP or internal corporate intranet environment." As well as partnering with Netscape, SGI has formed an Internet Advisory Council, made up of Internet service providers and other companies building Web supersites. The group, says SGI, will discuss and determine "solutions to industry-wide issues" regarding Internet server scalability and real-time access. Founding members include AT & T, CitySearch, Excite, GTE, Hiway Technologies and Warner Brothers.