By Karen Rodriguez World Wide Web sites handling several hundred thousand hits per day have maxed out on the usage analysis tools that came to market just six months ago.

In many instances, the time it takes to generate reports that process gigabytes of data is much too long.

Products from Interse Corp. (www.interse.com) and other companies were built to use the Web server log for gathering statistics, which are then imported into a database for further analysis. But the transfer from the server to database can take longer than five hours for several gigabytes of usage data.

And in the case of usage analysis services, such as Internet Profiles Corp., or I/Pro (www.ipro.com), and NetCount LLC (www.netcount.com) the reports from data gathered in a single day's Web site activities may not be returned for several days.

A newcomer to the usage analysis tool market, Andromedia Inc. (www.andromedia.com), is offering a beta version of its Aria product, which is aimed at high-volume sites, such as Pathfinder, that want to turn their Web sites into a strategic marketing tool. The Andromedia tool will ship this fall.

K2 Design Inc. (www.k2design.com), which builds Web sites for corporations, announced it will integrate Andromedia's Aria systems into its suite of services and product offerings.

"Andromedia's solution can especially handle greater volumes of data, and because the information is put into a database real-time, it's tracking real visitors, not inferred visitors," says Leslie Howard, vice president of product development at K2 Design, in New York.

"The other systems out there today are built to track hits, and now advertisers are interested in looking at visitors and page views," says Howard. "We need more information, such as navigational path, what time is spent where and activity on an individual basis, so then we can aggregate up to get overall statistics. If organizations spend $20,000 on a Web site, they want to make sure it works."

The Aria Recorder is a server based data management engine that captures messages from the Aria.Monitor on the Web server, such as cookie profiles or form field data, and passes them in real-time in the server's object database.

The recorder serves as a generic database engine that can be used with a variety of applications.

Through Aria application programming interfaces, or APIs, companies can use existing applications, such as NetGravity Inc.'s (www.netgravity.com) AdServer or I/Pro's I/Audit software, and other custom applications, to capture and manage data on visitors, navigation patterns, Web content and advertising.

So for example, a market research company could use the Aria Recorder to collect data from member companies' Web sites and aggregate the various reports.

Another benefit to using Aria is that the API allows K2 to integrate third party data into the report.

For example, K2 can combine a user's Internet Protocol, or IP address and domain name with InterNIC's geographic IP roster to nail down the specific location of a visitor.

Another option is for K2 to let its clients in the database marketing business cross-reference user information obtained from the user's browser with Dun & Bradstreet's standard industry codes.

The drawback is that in order to take advantage of Aria's high-performance system, which is said to process 80 to 180 transactions per second, an organization must run the software on a four-processor Sun Microsystems Inc. Sparcstation and not an ordinary Unix or Windows NT system.