Company Press Release

Digital Creations and Fast Engines Team For Scalable Web Application Servers; Combination Brings Commercial Reliability to Valuable Open Source Software

FREDERICKSBURG, Va., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Creations, creator of Zope(TM) and the leader in Open Source web development, announced that it is partnering with Fast Engines, the leader in web server acceleration software, to provide commercial-grade scalability for the Zope web application server. The alliance will dramatically improve the ability of high-volume e-commerce sites to handle peak traffic flows. Because Fast Engines enables load balancing across a wide range of platforms, dynamic applications operating in a cross-platform server environment can function reliably, even at peak times with 'flash crowds'.

With the agreement, Digital Creations will provide its clients with pre- configured versions of Fast Engine's Fast.Serv product starting January 7, 2000. Fast.Serv is a commercial implementation of the open source FastCGI Protocol for high-performance integration of web servers and web applications. Zope already provides integration with open implementations of FastCGI, but it lacks the high-volume load balancing and cross-platform features of Fast.Serv.

``Digital Creations enables companies to render their e-commerce sites more robust by fully exploiting our free, open-source Zope platform.'' says Paul Everitt, CEO of Digital Creations. ``With Fast Engines, both the Zope community and Digital Creations customers get a high-quality, high-performance commercial solution for web server integration.''

Additionally, Digital Creations will resell the new load-balancing version of Fast.Serv with ZEO, the Digital Creations custom solution for applications demanding scalability and failover. ``Fast.Serv excels at bringing tremendous performance gains to dynamic applications,'' added Semyon Dukach, CTO of Fast Engines. ``The alliance with Digital Creations and Zope takes us into the future of cross-platform application servers based on open standards.''

About Digital Creations

Digital Creations is the publisher of Zope and the leader in open source web development. Zope is an open source application server for building high- performance, dynamic web sites. Zope runs on almost all UNIX platforms and Windows NT, and can be used with popular web servers or its own built-in web server. Visit http://www.digicool.com/ for more information, and get Zope free at http://www.zope.org/.

About Fast Engines, Inc.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fast Engines is the leader in developing and marketing high performance software for accelerating Web-based applications that generate custom content. Fast Engines is an Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM - news) Alliance Partner, which means that joint customer web sites will benefit from improved download speed, reliability and performance. Fast Engines' Fast.Serv product for Netscape, Apache and Microsoft servers is being used by dozens of high-traffic web sites within Fortune 500 companies including The New York Times, Delta Air Lines, ZDNet, Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, and A.G. Edwards. For more information go to http://www.fastengines.com.