Abeona Networks Makes Its Debut, Unveils Web Infrastructure Solution that Breaks the Web Transaction Barrier to Create Profitable Web Commerce.

Business Editors, High-Tech Writers

Networld+Interop Atlanta 2001

Booth 6917

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 11, 2001

New Abeona Web Transaction Controller will enable Web businesses to simultaneously serve higher transaction volumes, decrease response

times, and reduce costs to achieve profitability

Abeona Networks, Inc. today made its public debut with the unveiling of an advanced network infrastructure solution targeting the rapidly growing Web commerce market. Available immediately, the Abeona K-2000 Web Transaction Controller (WTC) is the first of a new category of Web commerce infrastructure product that enables online businesses to achieve a 10X increase in the number of clients they can serve and a 10X increase in speed at which they can serve them. This order-of-magnitude leap allows businesses engaged in all forms of Web commerce to achieve dramatic improvements in the amount of business they can do, and in the quality of the total Web commerce experience they can deliver.

"To be successful, companies engaged in all forms of customer-facing business activity on the Web must simultaneously serve higher transaction volumes, decrease response times, and reduce costs to achieve profitability. In short, they must break the `Web Transaction Barrier,'" said Vaibhav Malawade, Abeona Networks' founder and CEO. "Current infrastructures based on ad-hoc, point products cannot do the job. Our barrier-breaking Web Transaction Controller is a new infrastructure solution that enables companies to provide fast, rich, dynamic experiences for their customers - and thereby capitalize on the phenomenal opportunity that Web commerce offers for increasing revenues and lowering the cost of doing business."

Malawade noted that the inability to break the Web Transaction Barrier threatens the success of any online business activity. Slow system response times may force customers as well as partners and suppliers to wait too long to complete an online transaction - sometimes a half a minute or more. Additionally, periods of massive transaction volumes can entail catastrophic delays that alienate customers, resulting in loss of revenues and often generating lasting ill will. Recent industry reports confirm the extent of the problem: According to Zona Research, up to $25 billion in Web commerce will be lost this year due to abandonment by frustrated customers - and over time, the bulk of the delays will be attributable to latencies in the systems that generate and deliver customized transactions.

"In the first phase of the Internet revolution, blazing fast response time was nice - now it's a necessity. In the first phase, if a network crashed or slowed down due to a spike in user load, it was understandable - now it's unforgivable. In the first phase, transactions were relatively simple and lightweight - now they can be incredibly complex and demanding on the infrastructure," said Alberto Savoia, ex-Chief Technologist for Keynote Systems and the world's leading authority on Internet performance under load. "The next phase of the Web revolution cannot be implemented on ancient network architectures; it will require new solutions that can provide real-time performance, at all load levels, regardless of transaction complexity. Abeona's Web Transaction Controller promises to deliver on all three counts."

Abeona WTC solves end-to-end problem in a single solution

Conventional Web infrastructures cannot provide the performance and capacity to break the Web Transaction Barrier at an acceptable cost. Until now, the only possible strategy has been to add more equipment - i.e., Web servers, application servers, database servers and related network devices - in order to build an infrastructure that provides a level of bulk capacity which always exceeds the highest expected demand. This is akin to a grocery store having 100 checkout lines staffed 24 hours a day regardless of the level of customer traffic. The over-purchasing of resources by 2X, 3X, or even more, places an added strain on profitability, and is extremely risky as a long term strategy for ensuring adequate service levels.

The Abeona K-2000 Web Transaction Controller is a sophisticated hardware/software system that supersedes traditional Web infrastructures by leveraging patent-pending server, switching, and transaction control technologies to handle unprecedented numbers of simultaneous customers and deliver responses predictably and quickly under all conditions.

The Abeona WTC has enormous capacity for handling simultaneous connections and serves Web content with near-zero latency - eliminating the "front-end" bottlenecks that plague many conventional systems. In addition, the Abeona WTC optimizes Web transaction flow by combining customer-defined business priorities with real-time information from intelligent Abeona agents deployed on application servers. Using advanced proprietary algorithms, the WTC achieves a net increase in the number of transactions that a customer's back-end systems can serve, as well as a 10X or greater improvement in response time, while ensuring that application servers never fail due to overloads. Moreover, the WTC provides for customer-defined business logic that allows Web businesses to prioritize which customers get served first in the event of overloads - a critical capability for reducing infrastructure costs and for improving customer loyalty through differentiated levels of service. And with Abeona's unique clustering technology, WTCs are designed to scale linearly to support installations that, regardless of size, behave as a single system.

With these capabilities, the Abeona Web commerce solution can be used by any type of business engaged in or planning to implement commerce on the Web - buying, selling, trading, tracking shipments, managing accounts, and so on. Enterprises and service providers alike can take advantage of Abeona's solutions, gaining competitive advantage by delivering levels of service at costs that cannot be matched by current infrastructure options. Response from initial customers has been extremely favorable: "eQuest is the leading provider of online software to effectively manage, store and post job positions to a multitude of employment sites and networks from one Internet location. The nature of the online job posting business is incredibly transaction intensive and we are always looking for innovative infrastructure solutions to help us deliver better service at a lower cost," said John Malone, CEO of eQuest. "By providing global control of transactions from the edge to the application servers, Abeona and their K-2000 Web Transaction Controller can help us to continue to reduce the total costs associated with supporting over 1000 direct job posting sites."

Abeona's world-class team and top-tier backers

Abeona's founders, who launched the company in 1999, and its key management are industry veterans who draw on their extensive Web infrastructure experience gained at Sun Microsystems, BEA, Global Center, and Informix. Abeona is backed by two pre-eminent venture capital firms - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

"We're entering an exciting new phase of the Web revolution - where old network architectures will give way to a new generation of intelligent, real-time, easily managed infrastructure," said Vinod Khosla, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and one of the world's most respected and successful venture capitalists. "Abeona's Web Transaction Control systems will be at the center of next generation of Internet based transactions. We've looked at hundreds of companies in our search for the future stars, and Abeona is up in front."

Abeona's Directors and Advisors include industry luminaries Vinod Khosla and Tom Jermoluk (Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers), Pierre Lamond (Sequoia Capital), Paul Pluschkell (Global Crossing), William Chang (Westlake Group), and David Stiles (Redback).

Pricing and availability

The Abeona K-2000 Web Transaction Controller is available immediately. The list price of the 1U high, 19" rack-mount K-2000 base unit is $25,495. Options for the K-2000 include a hardware SSL accelerator card, field-replaceable hard disk assembly, and field-replaceable power supply. A WTC MegaCluster, consisting of 4 WTCs in a redundant Cluster configuration is list priced at $101,980. A WTC GigaCluster can support 1 gigabit/second of highly dynamic Web throughput with as few as seven K-2000 WTCs.

For more information, please visit www.abeona.com. Abeona is located at 46117 Landing Parkway, Fremont, CA 94538; Phone [phone].

Abeona Networks, Inc. and the Abeona logo are trademarks of Abeona Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, and service marks are the property of their respective owners