Akamai Launches Web Application Accelerator

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (www.akamai.com), a service provider for accelerating content and business processes online, today announced the general availability of Web Application Accelerator, an innovative solution for accelerating Web-based enterprise applications.

The managed service enables enterprises to extend dynamic, highly-interactive, externally-facing Web applications, including customer-facing portals, collaboration platforms, E-Learning environments, and business-to-business commerce, to the Akamai platform.

Dozens of enterprises, including Cathay Pacific Airways, Frictionless Commerce, The SKF Group, and the U.S. Air Force, trust Akamai Web Application Accelerator to achieve greater adoption of their Web applications through improved performance, higher availability, and an enhanced worldwide user experience.

Enterprise IT professionals face ongoing challenges in delivering centrally-located and -managed Web applications on a global scale. These online applications, which represent critical business processes, are often slow, unreliable and unpredictable, affecting user adoption, satisfaction and productivity.

"Application performance has come to represent a company's status of excellence. Whether to internal employees, partners in a protected business ecology, or to consumers and prospects over the public Web, quality of application performance equals quality of business service," said Dana Gardner, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group.

Alternative solutions to optimizing Web application performance, such as those that are appliance-based, require businesses to implement and maintain hardware.

"In today's demand economy, users expect immediate access to information -- when, where, and how they want it. As enterprise applications increase in value, performance and availability become ever more critical. Poor performance and availability impede user productivity, application use and adoption, hindering business growth," said Tom Leighton, Chief Scientist at Akamai.

Early adopter customers from the automotive, high-technology, manufacturing, and financial services verticals have embraced the Akamai Web Application Accelerator service.

Cathay Pacific Airways of Hong Kong, the world's sixth-largest cargo carrier by volume, was experiencing performance degradation for users trying to access its consumer, agent, and cargo extranet sites, hosted in Hong Kong, from other parts of the world.

Cathay Pacific Airways knew that slow site performance would hinder future business growth, but realized that building out its infrastructure to address the performance challenge would be complex, and ultimately, would not help overcome global performance issues.

Scott Ohman, Manager of E-Business, Commercial for Cathay Pacific Airways said, "Increased site speed is undoubtedly a major contributor to all of the beneficial effects we've seen on our sites. Without Akamai, there is no way that a 100 percent increase in online bookings would have occurred."

Sweden-based SKF Group, the leading global supplier of products and services in the rolling bearing business, uses an extranet infrastructure centrally hosted in Europe, consisting of more than 100 group websites to interact with thousands of global customers.

This approach has brought several challenges to the company, particularly with its ability to provide high-quality performance and availability to customers and employees in the Asia-Pacific region, where the company is experiencing high growth. After evaluating a number of options, SKF chose Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service to solve the performance problem.

"Akamai's connection optimization technology brought dramatic performance improvements - over a 150 percent increase - to the Asia-Pacific region's ability to access dynamic content that must route back for transaction to our origin server in Europe," said Richard Olivecrona, Director, Internet and Intranet Management, SKF Group.

The Akamai Web Application Accelerator service includes tools that give enterprises the visibility and control to help them optimize their site's performance and ensure the effectiveness of application delivery via Akamai's EdgeControl Management Center.