China ripe for Net-use control

China is set to become Asia's largest Internet user base this year, and mainland-based enterprises will soon need help managing Net traffic as complex applications fight for limited bandwidth.

Craig Elliott, president and chief executive at Packeteer - a bandwidth-management system vendor - said the mainland represented a big opportunity for the company's products.

The products are supposed to act as 'bouncers on the Net', ensuring that less-urgent traffic such as casual Web browsing is kept in check, while business-critical applications, such as 'expensive financial systems from Oracle or SAP' have the bandwidth they require.

'The value proposition in this case is very clear, it is about making the most of existing bandwidth resources, emphasising productivity over simple connectivity,' Mr Elliott said.

Cupertino, California-based Packeteer develops and sells systems such as AppVantage and PacketShaper to help network managers reduce congestion that results from such Internet traffic as audio-file transfers enabled by programs including Napster and Gnutella, Net commerce transactions, or multimedia transmissions.

'I have a 700 megaHertz, Pentium processor portable computer with 128 megabytes of Ram and a 10-gigabyte hard drive, and I can personally take down a network via file transfer,' Mr Elliott said.

'If you are a CIO (chief information officer) of a major corporation and you have thousands of users all with the same power on their desktop, you need to get control of your network, and that is what we provide.