In 1999, Dr Willy Chiu, noticing the emergence of many large and complex customer Web sites, and observing how they often failed to deliver the expected robustness and customer satisfaction, set up a new team within IBM called the High-Volume Web Sites (HVWS) team. This team was chartered to work with customers and IBM internal teams involved in the creation and deployment of really large Web sites, and in particular those supporting e-business applications used by customers over the Internet -- typical business to customer (B2C) applications but large and complex ones. The team would learn from this experience and document proven best practices so that customers could learn how to make high-volume Web sites that worked well, and so that IBM developers could improve their products to better support high- volume sites. The team has locations in California, New York, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

On December 9, 2003 IBM announced that it has chosen Silicon Valley as the location for its first "e-business on demand Center of Competency" -- which will amass heavy technology resources and expertise to help companies advance their Internet initiatives. The Center of Competency in IBM's Silicon Valley Lab will be the first of several to open in the next year as part of IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Samuel J. Palmisano's $10 billion commitment for research, acquisitions, marketing and training centers devoted to e-business on demand. This is IBM's one-year-old initiative to help companies improve efficiency, productivity, and their ability to respond to changing conditions such as peaks in customer demand.

IBM is beefing up capabilities in the Silicon Valley lab to help companies that operate some of the world's busiest Web sites and must reliably handle huge, often unpredictable amounts of traffic (with page views that can soar into the hundreds of millions each day).
The center will house experts from IBM Software, IBM Research, and other parts of the company who are some of the world's top experts in high-performance Internet computing, as well as hundreds of server computers and other equipment that will allow companies to design and test new technologies for on-demand computing. The center is an extension of IBM's existing High-Volume Web Site Lab in the Silicon Valley Lab, which has worked with eBay, Charles Schwab, CIGNA, Federated Department Stores, VISA and many others to stretch the boundaries of business computing on the Internet.

As it accumulates experience and knowledge, the HVWS team publishes papers aimed at helping CIOs and others like you understand and meet the new challenges presented during one or more of the phases. This IBM Redbook is a compilation of the HVWS papers, which are available individually at the HVWS Web page:

http://www.ibm.com/websphere/developer/zones/hvws

A prior Redbook from the High-Volume Web Sites Team is available for download by selecting the "Additional Material" link from the menu on the upper right. The Redbook number is SG24-6562-00 and titled, " Best Practices for High-Volume Web Sites".

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