Success in today's world requires timely Internet solutions that effectively meet market demands. Sophisticated e-business applications and value-added services are vital to enterprises' business strategies because they directly impact their bottom lines. In this Web-driven world, assimilating business processes with networked applications, leveraging a Center-to-Edge information infrastructure represents the core of your e-business model.

Having the flexibility to choose the best software applications and Center-to-Edge infrastructure to manage your business's information fabric is a must. While a great deal of industry attention has been focused on the promise of Internet-based applications and services, those require a defined way for network-based applications to communicate with the latest caching, proxy and content delivery systems.

The Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) enables enterprises to choose the best of breed applications and infrastructure. ICAP enables a new class of services by allowing site owners to offer Web applications closer to the user. ICAP is a lightweight and extensible point-to-point protocol that effectively adapts content for user needs. Since its introduction in 1999 ICAP became the standard protocol for communication between proxy servers and callout servers.

The ICAP Forum consists of a group of vendors with a common desire to enable communication between edge devices and network-based applications. The Forum believes that working together can accelerate the availability of solutions, make the problems that need to be addressed more understandable, and assist the standards community in the development of open standards.

While the ICAP protocol is still widely in use today, the ICAP Forum has not seen a lot of attention in the recent years. Cloud Fellows took over the Co-Host role in 2023 and is committed to restart the ICAP Forum efforts soon.

Martin Stecher
President, ICAP Forum
Cloud Fellows GmbH