New Solutions From IBM Help Internet Service Providers Improve Quality of Service and Enable E-Business

BALTIMORE (March 17, 1998) – -Today at ISPCON, IBM introduced a series of solutions to help Internet service providers (ISPs) cut costs and deliver the quality of service required to make e-business a reality for their customers.
Based on many of the same technologies that powered the official Web site of the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, these new IBM solutions enable ISPs to evolve from providing simple Internet access to a broader relationship with their customers that includes managed services like differentiated Web and commerce hosting.
”No other company in the world offers ISPs the breadth of integrated hardware, software and services solutions that are available from IBM,” said Randall E. McComas, vice president, telecommunications, global telecommunications and media industries. ”ISPs play a critical role in enabling e-business, and we are committed to providing them with the infastructure they need to better service their customers and to grow revenue and profits.”
With today’s announcements, IBM expands its solution offerings for ISPs in the following areas:
Content Management
By combining proven technologies and services, IBM now provides ISPs with an integrated offering that enhances the performance and reliability essential to Web hosting and services. This solution, code named ”Nagano,” includes caching, load balancing and replication features that reduce server congestion, increase content availability, and improve Web server performance.
Also introduced today is Distributed Web Traffic Express, a Web caching solution that extends the functionality of the ”Nagano” offering to provide a unified caching environment, further minimizing an ISP’s bandwidth and storage requirements and improving overall performance.
Commerce Hosting and Transaction Processing
Net.Commerce transaction server allows ISPs to use the Net.Commerce merchant server engine as an Internet check-out counter for customers that want to host and manage their own catalogs. This flexible commerce transaction engine supports a variety of Web and
catalog creation tools.
In addition, Web Site Constructor provides ISPs with a tool for their business customers to easily create commerce-enabled Web sites.
Infastructure
IBM is now offering an automated billing enhancement to its Intelligent Subscriber Management System (ISMS)(a) based on technology from Expansion Systems Corporation’s TotalBill(b) system. With the addition of this new billing feature, ISMS provides ISPs with an integrated subscriber management and billing solution to help them manage a growing customer base and offer flexible billing options.
IBM Solutions in Use Today
IBM’s offerings for ISPs are designed to meet the needs of providers around the world for value-added solutions that can be quickly designed and deployed, with infastructure that securely enables communication, collaboration, content, and commerce.
”As Deutsche Telekom expanded to become Europe’s largest Internet service provider, we needed to implement an Internet hosting infastructure to effectively manage both content and Web traffic in a multi-vendor environment across many nodes distributed throughout Germany,” said Wolfram Bauer, Deutsche Telekom executive. ”We used both IBM hardware and software products to create a scalable, highly available server infastructure to provide our customers with fast Internet services.”
The IBM Global Telecommunications and Media Industries business unit offers a wide range of solutions for telecommunications, cable TV, wireless, broadcasting, publishing, advertising, sports and entertainment industries, as well as Internet service providers in more than 160 countries.

Source: IBM

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