America Online on Tuesday signed an agreement to become a customer of Sandpiper's Footprint content delivery service, to improve the speed of AOL services such as the Netscape Netcenter information portal.

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AOL will use the Footprint service for delivering content, including AOL.com, Netscape Netcenter, and the AOL ICQ chat service, to AOL users.



"[AOL] has all these tremendous content properties which a lot of people -- who are AOL subscribers and who are just general Internet users -- access," said Scott Yara, vice president of corporate strategy for Sandpiper/Digital Island. "They're using our content delivery services to improve the speed and performance of those content properties. The content delivery market has gained a lot of momentum and people are really getting excited about it.

"I think this is really a landmark in terms of one of the biggest content providers on the Internet really entrusting a content delivery service provider to ensure high performance," Yara said.

Before agreeing to merge with Digital Island in October, Sandpiper and AOL had a strategic partnership in which Sandpiper has been deploying its servers within the AOL network. AOL also has been a Sandpiper investor, Yara said.

"AOL represents 18 million or 19 million eyeballs around the world, so it's in our best interest to put our servers in the AOL network, and we've been doing that for close to 9 months now," Yara said. "It's in AOL's best interest to make the experience the best possible for the end-user, for their subscribers, so they're going to encourage content to be located as closely inside the AOL network as possible. I think they view content delivery as so strategic they've actually picked us to handle their content properties outside of the AOL network for traditional, large Internet properties which they now have acquired and maintain."

Counting AOL's members as Footprint customers also gives Sandpiper/Digital Island leverage in battling content delivery companies such as Akamai Technologies and Adero for the top spot in a growing market.

"I think [the AOL customer win] is validation that we have the right solution with the combined entity," Yara said.

Sandpiper/Digital Networks Inc., in San Francisco, is at www.digitalisland.com. America Online Inc., in Dulles, Va., is at www.aol.com.