West Financial Banks on Content

¶ … West Financial Banks on Content Acceleration

MidWest Financial is a brick-and-mortar and a brick-and-click bank. It began providing online banking to its 16,000 members in 1997. About half of its members still relied on dial-up Internet connections to its site instead of faster broadband access.

Problem or Need

As a full-service financial institution, the market demands that Midwest Financial offer online banking services. The bank is worried about providing acceptable response times to its online customers, particularly the delivery of dynamically generated content such as account balances and information related to transaction processing to those users with dial-up connections. Customers require anytime, anywhere access.

Members accessing Midwest Financial's site via dial-up connections, often as slow as 28.8Kbits/sec, were seeing slow response times at pretty much any time of the day. It could take seventy seconds to get a page refreshed with personal information after logging in.

III. Objectives

Midwest Financial had many objectives and constraints when selecting the solution to its poor response time issues. First, it needed something it could acquire cost effectively because of its small budget of only $25,000. Further, Midwest perceived that it had to resolve Web site performance on the server side because each transaction was going back to the server for processing. Midwest was also targeted the speed of dynamic content vs. static content. It wanted something that would actually accelerate dynamic content rather than just caching it. This was a critical requirement for Midwest because every customer viewed their personal own data in their browser.

IV. Their Solution

MidWest Finanacial selected Packaeteer's AppCelera Internet Content Accelerator (ICX), a server-side acceleration model.

The system uses a combination of techniques such as compressing dynamically generated content and caching static images, to speed up Internet connectivity sessions, mostly benefiting users of dial-up Internet access services.

There are a number of other server-side acceleration devices on the market, but AppCelera ICX takes a more client-focused approach. AppCelera ICX is a standalone appliance that sits between a server farm and the LAN in intranet applications or a Web site's Internet connection.

The system is designed to reduce the amount of time it takes for Web pages to load. It accomplishes this task by monitoring each user's connection rate to the Web site, while also tracking the capabilities of the visitor's browser. The product uses content transformation and rich and large file graphics conversion to speed content delivery. AppCelera also offloads Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) processing to increase the performance of Web servers. CIO Mike Stevens says members have seen a performance improvement of about fifty percent since system deployment.

Before making the final AppCelera decision, MidWest Financial took a llok at caching appliances, but found them to be more beneficial for static content. Many other devices were more than double the company's budget.

V. Unanswered Questions

Answers to the following questions would be useful to properly assess Midwest Financial's options.

Did the company try to optimize its site for use over by low-bandwidth connections by, for example, using HTML pages light on graphics and streaming media?

Although half of Midwest Financial's members currently use dial-up Internet connections, what are their plans for the future? Doesn't Midwest expect Broadband to grow over time and dial-up to decline?

The company has taken an approach that is of benefit to dial-up users. Does this mean that broadband users are completely happy with their performance times? Could this change as Midwest Financial enrolls more online members?

Will the client-side approach of AppCelera ICX still work as the number of online members grow and place heavier demand on Midwest's servers?