[Editors Note: This is a guest post by Ed Robinson, CEO of Aptimize, a company that produces software to accelerate Websites. – KN]

The tech bubble of the late 90’s was fueled largely by the promise of universal high-speed Internet access.  As millions of consumers gained access to the Internet, new market opportunities seemed to emerge on a daily basis.

I’ve given the below-embedded presentation to top executives at large internet companies and networking players over the last week, and the feedback has been unanimous: the Web has indeed gotten so complex that we’re in a critical moment for it’s overall maturation. (Click the link below)

Content is so heavy, and networks so overburdened, that more efficient use of what we have is not only core competence, but critical behavior.

State of Web Content Today

As richer, more dynamic, more interactive sites have hit the Web in force; the existing infrastructure has become alarmingly insufficient.  While high-speed broadband has tried to meet the infrastructure demands of the exploding volume and size of content on the Web, it is clear that throwing pure infrastructure at the problem isn’t enough.

Two new markets emerged from these challenges – the content delivery network market (CDN) and the application delivery controller market (ADC).

Remarkably, those two markets are now struggling to keep up with the explosive growth of the Web.  Sites are too big, too dynamic, and too rich for our existing infrastructure, and prevailing techniques for optimizing performance.

Today, we’re embarking upon the third major evolution in modern Web performance, and it seems to be going unnoticed by the majority of entrepreneurs and technologists.

Second-gen technologies like CDN’s and ADC’s are among the most important technologies affecting the future of the Web – but they need to be supercharged. They need extra help.

We are struggling to keep up with the growth of the Web, particularly in mobile.

So what’s next?

Web content optimization (WCO) is one of the largest market opportunities in the tech sector today, and it’s going to pave the way for the next major era of the Internet. Without it, innovation gets throttled.

Four Problems You Can’t Ignore

Most of the Web performance challenges we face today can be traced back to four basic trends that should be self-evident to anyone who works in the tech sector:

1. Third party content – Any given Website you visit incorporates vast amounts of third party content – this includes content such as advertisements, widgets and syndicated feeds like you see on most media sites.
2. Dynamic – Sites are now required to be more dynamic than our infrastructure can handle – Twitter feeds are constantly changing and the data can’t be cached, and furthermore we expect a high degree of personalization and individually relevant experiences when we visit sites.
3. More, more, more – Put simply, we’re experiencing a content explosion – sites have more pages, more pictures and more videos packed into the pages than ever before, and the explosion is still going strong.
4. New devices – Myriad new devices hit the market every month, all of which are internet-enabled.  This doesn’t just mean more Macbook Air’s and iPads either; we are also talking about refrigerators, low-cost home security cameras, and even cars!

If that’s not enough – I’m sure you can name a few more factors contributing to today’s Web performance woes.

And why is this happening?

There is a new party in town, and its called social media. We’re partying hard and the hangover has arrived – the existing infrastructure can’t keep up.  It’s not a capacity problem, it just that our content delivery infrastructure wasn’t designed for what’s happening.

The existing infrastructure is designed on three premises and assumptions:

1. Single origin – Most content will originate from the same webservers, so if these are working properly, then everything is good
2. Static content – Most information will stay the same, and therefore can be cached across the data center and Internet
3. Fast delivery – Because content comes from a single origin and doesn’t change, caching and route optimization can deliver everything quickly

The problem is that social media turns this on its head.  Content is mashed-up, syndicated, streamed from everywhere – with different qualities of service. So even if you’re paying $500K for a CDN and great ADCs, your pages will still slow down to the lowest-common-denominator such as a slow ad-service or the slower speeds of a streamed page from Facebook.

Yes, we can build new infrastructure, but it will take too long, and it may not be enough.  We can throw better CDN technology at it, but bridging distances only helps so much, and it doesn’t do anything for dynamic content, which literally can’t be cached.

At the end of the day – these four factors have driven intense demand for a new type of Web acceleration that wasn’t built to meet the demands of yesterday’s Web.

With Our Powers Combined, We Are…

The good news is that we have the technology to solve the problem, and there has already been a good deal of investment to put the wheels in motion – we’re seeing the ADC, CDN and optimization markets converge to do this.

The funny thing is that it has all been happening largely under the radar.

Last week Limelight Networks acquired AcceloWeb for up to a rumored $20 million in a cash and stock deal.  AcceloWeb’s technology does precisely what I’ve hinted at so far – it accelerates Web content so that it can travel faster over our existing Internet infrastructure.

This is an important point – a traditional CDN company is making a large investment in Web content optimization and acceleration.  These are two fundamentally different markets converging under one company, yet we hardly heard any talk about the strategy behind the investment.

Similarly – the week before last Google announced that Google Analytics now offers a Site Speed Analytics Report.  It was greeted with applause from the Web acceleration community, but nobody really heard about how this “feature” had much broader implications for the Web.

Google isn’t just helping you measure your site’s speed – they want the Web to be lightening fast.  It’s critical to the future of their business that the Web isn’t crippled by performance woes.

Their revenue is still largely ad-based – yes – ads, which contribute costly seconds to load times if we don’t find a solution.  Not to mention – the faster a site loads, the more ads Google can serve.

Google cares about web performance because it’s absolutely critical to their business and the future of the Web itself.

Just How Big Is This?

It’s considered rare to find sex appeal in the enterprise technology market – but there’s absolutely no doubt that multi-billion dollar market opportunities are very appealing to investors and entrepreneurs alike.  Box.net’s CEO, Aaron Levie, made this point a year ago, and it still rings true.

But it’s not just the market opportunity for ADC’s, or CDN’s, or Web content acceleration that’s exciting here.  What’s more important is the future of the Web, and what this evolution in Web performance will spawn.

We’re talking about Web-scale personalization that isn’t held back by performance problems.  Personalization is the Web topic de-jour, but we’re not going to reach the promise of true Web personalization if we can’t load Web pages faster than we’re doing on average today.

Similarly, the mobile Web is going to face major obstacles if we can’t tune our apps to perform on even the most troubled networks.

And we sure as heck aren’t going to usher in the future of virtual personal assistants if we can’t conduct complex processing and deliver that content at the speeds that consumers demand.

Oddly enough – the success or failure of these admittedly sexy technologies hinges upon a critical evolution in Web performance.  And all of a sudden, the ADC market is starting to look a lot sexier to investors, entrepreneurs and incumbent technology companies alike.

It’s worth getting excited about. This isn’t just the rise of some dorky enterprise software.

Every site, every app, and every device is subject to severely limiting Web performance constraints today.

ADC’s, CDN’s and Web acceleration technologies are converging to mold the keys.