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But Digital Island CEO Ruann Ernst can spare you -- showing where users are located when they log in. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Mark Compton Feb. 28, 2000 \| Internet time indeed. Less than three years ago, Digital Island was busily carving out a nice little niche for itself by helping a select number of corporate clients accelerate intranet traffic across a high-capacity private network. Not a bad business, really, but very small beer in comparison to what's been brewing more recently at Digital Island, where months of wheeling and dealing have helped to put a nice little head on things. Digital Island is now working feverishly to extend e-business delivery capabilities to every nook and cranny of the globe. The conglomeration process picked up a whole lot of steam in December with the finalization of the company's merger with Sandpiper Networks, which served to fuse Sandpiper's content-delivery capabilities with Digital Island's data delivery and hosting services -- as well as its global string of data centers. That was enough to encourage Sun Microsystems and Inktomi to jump on board not just as technology partners but also as significant investors, no doubt with an eye to building the world's dominant infrastructure for interactive e-business. Real Networks had already announced it would work with Digital Island and Inktomi to enable advanced media streaming across the network and, in January, Digital Island managed to expand on this by acquiring Live On Line, a leading supplier of live multicast and on-demand streaming media services. Ruann Ernst, Digital Island's hard-charging chairman and CEO, is at the helm -- living life on fast-forward and developing a real taste for the rough-and-tumble. Digital Island is one of the better company names I've come across -- it sounds more like prime-time programming than high-speed networking. Still, given all the strategic partnerships you've entered into over the past few months, wouldn't "Let's Make a Deal" be more apt? Yeah. Why didn't we think of that? The thing is, we're looking to provide the most robust global e-business infrastructure possible. No one company can do it all. It requires selective strategic partnerships to deliver what enterprises need. And those partnerships have to be executed in Internet time. So yes, strategic deals are important to us, and we'll continue to aggressively pursue those that we think are beneficial to our customers. Improving performance at the edges of the network has been a big story for you right along, but does the strength of that story get diluted as the pipes and switches of the public Internet continue to get bigger and faster? Well, actually, what we've promised all along is faster, better, guaranteed and richer end-user experiences. That's really what's most important. And we've always made the trade-offs that were necessary between bandwidth and storage at the edge of the network or at the heart of the network, for that matter, to enhance that experience. Our job is to use the best technology available at any point in time. Part of that, of course, has to do with being the leader at pushing content to the edges, but it's just as important to be able to guarantee the round-trip response. For example, it doesn't do E-Trade much good to be able to stream a video clip providing vital background on a company if potential traders don't have enough bandwidth to be able to respond immediately with orders. As to whether we'll ever get to the point where bandwidth is free, I have to say I doubt it. Ultimately, there will always be some trade-off between where to put computer power and storage power and where to use bandwidth in a truly intelligent, distributed network. It's not just about the size of your pipes. It also has to do with where the content is hosted and many other issues. Next page \| What is "geographic intelligence" and what are you doing with it?