Varnish Software, a pioneer in caching software and high-performance content delivery, today announced the Varnish E-Commerce AcceleratorTM. This new feature enables e-commerce platforms to dynamically cache personalized content while ensuring highest performance. It is available immediately as part of Varnish 6.0, the latest release.

With the rise of the experience economy, consumers today expect highly personalized content tailored to their interests. Due to its changing nature and security requirements however, this type of content has been considered “uncacheable.” This has forced e-commerce sites to make performance tradeoffs and accept slower loading times (see editor’s note). Given that so many e-commerce sites offer personalized content across so many different locations, this presents a huge dilemma. Even something as simple as a session token that allows shoppers to add an item to a shopping cart can be deemed uncacheable.

With its Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator, Varnish Software tackles this problem. The Accelerator feature is deployed as part of the Varnish caching platform in front of e-commerce software. It is easy to install and does not require any additional developments or changes to the e-commerce platform. The Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator can fetch the personalized content, deconstruct it into components and re-assemble it where needed. This means the content becomes cacheable and can be reused across requests, serving personalized pages significantly faster. This enables hit rates (where requested content is found in the cache and delivered to the user) of 90 percent and higher.

“The Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator provides a significant improvement for delivering personalized content at optimal speed,” explains Lars Larsson, CEO of Varnish Software. “According to our own tests, run on the Magento e-commerce platform, Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator can manage 15,000 concurrent visitors per server instance, with a response time well below one millisecond. Finally, and very importantly, e-commerce sites do not have to choose between performance and personalization and can deliver satisfying customer experiences.”

Availability and pricing
The solution is available as of today and the price for a yearly subscription starts at $12,000 for one Varnish server (billed annually).

Resources
Find out more about the Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator: https://www.varnish-software.com/plus/ecommerce-accelerator/

More technical details including tests results in a Magento set-up:
https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/using-varnish-ecommer...

*Editor’s note
Caching works by creating a temporary storage area to store content so that applications or websites don’t have to keep re-accessing it from the central server. As such, a web cache can serve up tens of thousands of consecutive requests (users that visit the site) per second, speeding up website performance at least several hundred times over while reducing server load.

"New feature ensures personalization never comes at expense of website performance"

About Varnish Software

Varnish Software is a pioneer in high-performance digital content delivery including web and API Accelerator, streaming and content delivery. Powered by a uniquely flexible caching technology, Varnish Software’s solutions, are the indispensable common denominators among the world’s most popular websites and brands, such as Eurosport, Sky, Nikon, Ericsson, and Tesla. Varnish solutions enable organizations worldwide to provide fast and reliable digital content delivery at any scale while giving them the flexibility to maintain control over their content and make the technology their own.

Varnish Software has offices in London, New York, Stockholm, Oslo and Paris.

Varnish Software press contact:

Lars Larsson, CEO
Varnish Software Group
E-mail: larl@varnish-software.com
Tel: +46 70 603 36 32