Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Yottaa speeds up SMB websites with its first paid product

By Rodney H. Brown

Yottaa Inc. of Cambridge today rolled out to the general market a new service that intends to do for most websites what content delivery networks like Akamai Inc. do for web giants like Google Inc. – speed up the website for the end user.

The new service is called Yottaa Site Speed Optimizer and it uses the cloud to cache images and data from a company’s website and tweak it on the fly to make it reach the end user more quickly. According to co-founder and CEO Coach Wei, “Google spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run its websites.” That works if your company is a giant with billions in annual revenue, he said. “For the rest of the web, you just don’t have the resources to do this.”

While the Site Speed Optimizer uses as many as 100 different methods on each website to improve delivery speed, one example Wei cited was image optimization. While most website designers today know that every graphic on the site has to be as small a bit of data as possible, the site may contain dozens of these small graphics. Every time the site loads, it sends a call to the server for the first graphic, which gets delivered, then the second, and so on. Yottaa’s tools combine the small graphics into one slightly larger image file, and reduces the number of round trips to the server from dozens to one.

“It’s a cloud accelerated solution – that’s what we have been building over the last 12 to 14 months,” Wei said. “That’s what Amazon has built with Silk although that’s only for that one product.”

Wei is referring to the Silk browser, the new web browser that comes with Amazon’s new tablet, the Kindle Fire. It also uses the cloud to optimize every website called for by the Silk browser, to enhance the delivery speed over crowded cell or wi-fi connections. Amazon, in fact, plays a role in Yottaa’s new product, as one of the cloud services that it uses for its Optimizer software.

“We run this using a combination of the data center that we manage and established cloud providers – Amazon and a lot of other cloud providers,” Wei said.

The Site Speed Optimizer is targeted squarely at small to midsize businesses, Wei said. The service starts at about $29 per month and can push close to $1,000 per month, depending on website traffic. “On the higher end, it gets into the $700 to $800 a month range, if your site gets a million page views,” Wei said.

Yottaa was co-founded in 2009 by Wei, who is also the founder and chairman of Burlington-based Nexaweb Technologies Inc., a position he still holds, he said. In March of 2010 the company offered a free website performance tool called Insight that right now has close to 60,000 web services that use it. The company now has approximately 40 employees, according to Wei, with 20 in Cambridge and 20 in China.

In August 2010, Yottaa raised $4 million in a Series A round of venture capital financing from backers including General Catalyst Partners of Cambridge, Stata Venture Partners of Needham, and Cambridge West Ventures of Redwood City, Calif. Ray Stata of Stata Ventures and co-founder of Analog Devices Inc. is the chairman of Yottaa, Wei said. Stata was a recipient of the Mass High Tech Distinguished Achievement All-Star Award in 2010.