Akamai enhances managed services offering

Akamai Technologies now offers a series of enhancements to its managed services offering for accelerating Web-based enterprise applications. The company says 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.”

“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.

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

-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

-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

-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