Akamai Unveils Enhancements to Its Web Application Accelerator Solution

May 3, 2007; 03:43 AM
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online, announced today a series of enhancements to its managed services offering for accelerating Web-based enterprise applications.

New features of the Akamai Web Application Accelerator solution include a new service level agreement assuring network availability, enhanced pre-fetching capabilities, strategic global deployments, as well as the addition of real-time application performance reporting. Existing customers will automatically and seamlessly receive all these benefits without any software or hardware upgrades, or at any additional cost, a clear advantage of Akamai’s managed service over hardware alternatives.

“The Internet cannot support the performance demands of today’s business applications,” said Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai. “As enterprise applications increase in value, performance and availability, as well as the accompanying insight and reporting to track and measure performance, becomes ever more critical. Faster and more reliable applications correlate to greater utilization and adoption, which in turn results in more revenue for e-commerce sites, reduced dependency on physical call centers, and greater efficiency through improved online employee, partner and supplier productivity.”

For new customers, Akamai also announced today the availability of pre-defined integrations for the acceleration of SAP, Oracle and IBM WebSphere Portal applications. These pre-built integrations provide business-to-business customers with even faster return on investment.

Continues Leighton, “Years of integration experience in accelerating our customers’ mission-critical applications, combined with our recent acquisition of Netli, positions Akamai to help enable businesses to more quickly derive value from their Web-based applications. Enterprises choose Akamai to not only improve application performance and availability, but to also minimize hardware build-out and maintenance that can delay return on investment.”

New enhancements to the Akamai Web Application Accelerator solution provide customers with the following key benefits:

Faster Application Performance and Increased Application Availability

• Intelligent recursive pre-fetching capabilities and JavaScript parsing increases application performance to end users for complex frame-based, business-to-business applications
• Akamai’s global, performance-based SLA now adds 100 percent network availability
• Strategic platform deployments improve performance for end-users using business-to-business applications in high growth regions including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

Increased Visibility and Performance-based Reporting

• Akamai optimal route selection across the “middle mile” of the Internet is reported in real-time via the Akamai customer portal. Customers can view Akamai paths versus the Internet’s border gateway protocol (BGP) choices
• An example of this feature can be trialed on Akamai’s public site at: http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz2.html

Faster, Easier Deployment of Complex Enterprise Applications

• Pre-built, application-specific integrations for SAP, Oracle and IBM WebSphere Portal enable customers to leverage Akamai best practices for fast and reliable “out-of-the-box” acceleration of business-to-business applications

“As businesses realize the benefits of using web-enabled applications to help support global organizations, partners and customers – as well as the performance, efficiency and cost savings that can result – the need to find platforms and solutions that can support these applications outside of the firewall is critical,” said Neil Macehiter, Research Director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton, a specialist IT advisory firm. “Businesses need not only to think about security, but also speed of delivery, reliability and ease of access. Properly planned and delivered, these kinds of web-enabled applications can be a major success factor in today’s commercial environment.”

Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator service leverages Akamai’s globally-deployed platform to deliver consistent, improved application performance for enterprise customers. Akamai accelerates customers’ dynamic Web applications using a number of unique techniques including dynamic mapping, route optimization and connection optimization technology.

For more information on how Akamai helps enable business-to-business web applications, please visit http://www.akamai.com/html/solutions/web_application_accelerator.html.

About Akamai

Akamai® is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online. Thousands of organizations have formed trusted relationships with Akamai, improving their revenue and reducing costs by maximizing the performance of their online businesses. Leveraging the Akamai EdgePlatform, these organizations gain business advantage today, and have the foundation for the emerging Web solutions of tomorrow. Akamai is "The Trusted Choice for Online Business." For more information, visit www.akamai.com.

Akamai is a registered trademark of Akamai Technologies, Inc. IBM, Oracle and SAP are registered trademarks of their respective holders in the USA and other countries. All other brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act

The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by unauthorized users or others, failure to have available sufficient transmission capacity, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.